My Seedy Affair

See that little cute kid (the girl)? That’s me. Trust me, the cute didn’t last.

See that glamorous woman in the gray pantsuit? That’s Granny. The glamour survived until we put her in the frozen ground on one hell of a snowy afternoon. (A story for a later time.)

Granny could grow anything, likely because she grew up on a farm in Kansas. This picture was taken on one of the trips we took back to the old homestead, visiting my great-grandparents, also pictured. I can’t say for sure, but there’s a good chance this was the last trip we took while my great-grandmother was alive. It’s typical of most of my family memories, part nostalgia, part horror.

My last two (and only two) memories of my great-grandmother were her not remembering who my great-uncle’s children were and my Mom and Granny sobbing as they forcibly took her to the home with Alzheimer’s; from what I remember, the deciding factor was her attempted murder of my great-grandfather with a kitchen knife. Ironically enough, I still have a Pirates cup full of knives from Granny’s place from when she threatened to take a page out of the old family playbook a few years back. Good times…

Anyway…

Granny could grow anything, though her tastes tended towards invasive species, or what became such because maintenance wasn’t high on her to-do list. To this day and until the day I die, I swear that anyone who plants forsythia or Rose of Sharon is a damned fool.

When we’d come back to visit in the summer, there were always plenty of mulberries, raspberries, or gooseberries for the picking, and I never remember washing a thing. That also went for the tomatoes forever ripening (sometimes rotting) over the sink or on the windowsill in the kitchen.

It wasn’t just food she loved growing, though. She loved pine trees, palm trees, roses, whatever she got cheap that had been dying at Lowe’s, random flowers she brought back from Kansas and planted in Pennsylvania, you name it. The more exotic, the better. When I lived in one of her many houses during graduate school, she would call me after work almost every warm day to see if I’d noticed what she’d planted; the answer was always, “No,” because the whole little house was enveloped in flowers and shrubbery. I planted one thing I got at work for Secretary’s Day — nasturtiums — and she never quite forgave me because they went wild and snuffed out any number of plants I’d never noticed.

So, as you start to notice how many random plants and projects pile up on this page, understand I come by the tendency honestly.

Miss you, Granny.