My father’s mother was born in 1899. She was an unusual woman—bright, clever, funny, and frugal. She and my mother’s father were both natural teachers. I think it was those genes that made my father, brother and me into professors. Grandma was unforgettable in countless ways. She inherited and then poured her life into dogs passed to her from her grown kids. She scanned supermarket aisles for greeting card ideas, then rendered them in her own pen and pencil versions to save money at holidays and birthdays. She attended college at a time when few women sought a formal education. She taught adult Sunday school and hosted quilting bees in her farmhouse on the edge of town. She nursed elderly parents and siblings and a spouse. Grandma adored her three grandchildren. When we visited there was always a country walk or an exploration into the attic or the basement workbench or the city dump down the road. At Christmas there was an ancient tinsel tree with a floodlight that shown through a rotating filter wheel, bathing the tree sequentially in light of four different colors. In its day it must have been the height of consumer technology. There was no garbage disposal in this house. A pump and well were still just outside the side door to remind all that indoor plumbing had come along in living memory. A slop bucket stood in the kitchen, intriguing young boys and echoing back to a time when pigs were fed with table scraps.
Grandma had set up housekeeping during the Great Depression. Neither her kids nor grandchildren could quite picture what that must have been like. She was a canner. With a huge garden out back, the basement shelves were always stocked with glass jars of beets, beans and other vegetables. Garden produce was part of every meal, whether fresh radishes and lettuce in summer, or one of her signature canned sweet pickles in the depths of winter.
The garden and my grandmother were inseparable. That meant that my grandmother was a sworn and eternal enemy of rabbits. Between the dog, several layers of chicken wire fencing, and keen aim with a pellet gun, the large sunny garden behind the house was a risky place for rabbits. Fluffy cotton tails (without attached bunnies) were sometimes visible on a nearby board, as if to make a certain point to other would-be furry visitors. That garden and its devoted caretaker served food to an extended family and distant relatives for 60 years. Countless rabbits paid with their lives for a bite of leafy greens. Grandma stood her ground even when, old and tired and longing for a night of peaceful sleep, she found it hard to tend the rows in the hot sun.
Besides inheriting from grandma the desire to teach, I also inherited the visceral instinct to defend a garden against a rabbit. Our family lived for awhile in Nebraska and I installed behind our suburban home a tiny square of railroad ties to frame a miniature garden—just big enough for some squash and peppers and corn. No depth or height of plastic fencing could protect this wimpy collection of plants from the neighborhood rabbit. Early one Saturday morning I looked out through the mist and dew to see a fat rabbit sitting in the garden, eating greens as if a dessert after munching through the fencing. Something inside of me snapped. Indignant and enraged, wearing only pajamas, I burst through the back door. Flailing my arms and screaming at the top of my lungs, I sprinted toward the garden. That the unfolding scene was visible to my neighbors was of no concern to me. I reasoned that this terrorizing display would frighten the offending intruder to death. I did not reason that the dewy grass would be slippery. As I flew toward the garden in my attempt to imitate the cartoon Tasmanian devil, I was unable to stop. I fell on the wet grass and slid ten yards across the lawn, crashing into the railroad ties, damaging my knee, soaking in the wet grass, and banging my head. My performance came to a sudden conclusion. Nothing, however, could have prepared me for the insult that followed the injury. The intruding rabbit, not 6 feet from me, just casually turned its head to watch, still munching.
In due time Grandma’s last little dog died. Grandma spent a few months in nursing care away from that small house in Iowa. Grandma died while I was living in California. She never met her first great-grandchild.
My travels have only twice taken me past that rural house in the two decades since. Once I found the house empty and spent a few quiet moments sitting on the back porch steps listening to the voices on the wind blowing up from the pasture. Last summer I found myself there once again. Grandma has been gone a long time. The house is rented and surrounded by cars to be fixed, old bicycles, unraked leaves. Mobile homes dot what once was the pasture. The city dump is still there. I drove slowly past on the gravel road, seeing both now and then. Dusk was falling and before my eyes the lawn and pasture were coming alive with thousands of fireflies—streaks of yellow green adorning my darkening memories.
I then became aware of something else emerging from behind trees and tufts of grass, crossing the road ahead of me and peeking around rusting cars and piles of tires. As far as the eye could see, as if finally evening the score after six decades of lost time, the landscape was covered with the shadowy forms of hundreds of them. Rabbits.
12.2.06
