A little over twenty years ago, we started the process of moving our grandmother into assisted living. If you’ve ever done the same with a loved one, you understand the heartache that comes with a move like that. So many happy memories competing for real estate in your mind with the present sorrow.
Aside from a porch swing and a squeaky, rusted out rocking horse, she had little for toys. But that didn’t matter to me and her other 48 grandchildren. We used to explore her yard all summer long. There was a pear tree that was barely out of reach for the smallest of us, but the older cousins always came through. They would climb as high as necessary to make sure we had a pear or two. Her strawberry patch was like nothing I’ve ever seen and to this day, is still the most bountiful I’ve ever known. She even had a massive grapevine that followed her eastern fence line and though it hardly had enough summer to produce a substantive amount of grapes, we would still scour it in the midsummer for the even the tiniest yield and celebrate when we found some.
Of all the edibles she had growing in her yard, we were all able to take one of them with us and to this day, nearly every cousin still has this perennial in their yard as a reminder of our sweet and so very patient grandmother. On top of being a saint among us, she was a ridiculously talented chef. She would illicit our help harvesting from her mint plant, what seemed like every time we were there. We had no idea which of her recipes had the mint in them, but could not possibly care less as we were feasting. But the one that did clearly receive the fruit of our efforts was our reward for hard work: A beautiful glass of her homemade lemonade. She would garnish each vessel with a few leaves and we were beside ourselves as we basked in the joy that came with it.
One of those days we were packing, my dad brought all of us into her backyard and began handing out plastic cups. We crowded around her mint garden and began digging up individual plants. Each one of us went home that night with so much more than a little green little plant. We had a constant reminder of our grandmother that sparked the most perfect memories a person could ever hope to have.
It seems, now, that I go out of my way to include leaves from my grandmother’s plant in my cooking or any other concoction I create. Salad, smoothie, meat pie, and of course, lemonade, will all include her loving touch as an ingredient or a garnish. It doesn’t really matter because the good flavor that comes with it is just an added bonus to the memories I hold and share with my own children, who will one day take my grandmother’s mint, and her love, to their own homes.
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