The Twelve Gifts from the Garden . Charlene Costanzo
my grandmother in her garden. As she nurtured her plants, she also nurtured my innate love of nature. But today isn’t a gardening day. I breathe deeply and smile as I smell the strong scent of roses. I’m about five years old.
After the birds finish their baths, I open the screen door, enter a breezeway, then step up into the kitchen, where my grandmother stands at the kitchen table kneading dough. I smell stew simmering on the stove’s back burner. I tell Grandma Gorda that I love the smell of her roses. She smiles and promises to send a bouquet home with me when my dad picks me up after work, which will be soon.
She covers the dough for its second rise and tells me it’s her prayer time. We go into the living room and sit side by side on a loveseat as she retrieves her old, worn, black leather-bound prayer book.
I ask her to tell me, again, about her prayers. I ask this often.
“Of course, Charlanka.” I liked the special way she sometimes said my name.
She tells me how she prays every day for me and each of our family members here in America. She names the twenty people who gather here every Sunday after Mass.
She shows me her prayer book, explaining that it’s written in the Slovak language, the first language she spoke. I run my fingers over the strange-looking script. She teaches me a few Slovak words, we sing a Slovak song she’s taught me before, and she reminds me how to count: jeden, dva, tri…
Then comes the best part. She prays for family back in the Old Country. Her family. Our family. My family. I’ve got relatives in the Old Country? Whenever I hear this, it leads me to feel “rich” in some way. I have cousins there. What are they like? I want to know names. Are there girls my age? Did they start kindergarten yet? She explains that all of our closest family is here in America. She doesn’t know names and ages, but she knows that families grow, so I probably have cousins near my age there. And even if we never meet our distant relatives, we are still related to them—connected. Her caring about them and for them is a lesson for me, and a gift.
After praying for all of us living people, both here and there, she prays for all who died. Even though she says this prayer in English, many of the big words are unfamiliar to me. But I get an image of a special, holy light shining upon each of these people. I always get good feelings from how she prays for our dead relatives with love, especially her first two baby girls, Anna and Helen. Sometimes she gets tears in her eyes when she prays for them. They are my aunts who are “like angels in heaven.” And then, she prays for all of our family who are not even born yet. She prays for the children I will have some day. And their children. She even prays for the boy who will be my husband someday.
Here, under the traveler’s palm, for a few minutes I bask in that memory. I feel as if she is with me.
With reluctance, I return to ordinary mindfulness. I’m in this garden in the here and now. At the same time, I’m feeling connected with my grandmother and her long-ago prayers.
Throughout their childhoods, when they were worried or upset, I sometimes reminded my children about those daily prayers, said long ago, like pebbles dropped into a pond of time. During any time of hurt or hardship, and every time I had any kind of accident or a near miss of one, it helped to remember them. I have a sense of them being truly present, having traveled through time to me, my husband, and my children, rippling over us. They ripple over my grandchildren now too—her great-great-grandchildren.
Grandma Gorda gave me the gift of seeing time and family differently. It was more like just a seed of seeing differently when she first presented it to me. But the seed “took” and became a seedling she watered and nurtured every time I saw her. It grew and bloomed. It continues to grow. I nurture it now. And I thank her. And I thank the traveler palms for the gift of this voyage through time.
Family: like branches on a tree, we all grow in different directions, yet our roots remain as one.
—Unknown
Long ago, when my grandmother taught me about praying for my relatives from the Old Country, I made a wish. I wished that I would someday get to know those relatives, some of them, at least. Maybe just one cousin my age. I was five years old. It was well before I ever saw a traveler palm tree or heard of its legend of making wishes come true. But now, right now, as I pray as my grandmother did, I realize that this wish has come true. It’s something she would never have imagined. Nor would I have, really.
I haven’t actually met them yet, not in real life, but I have communicated with several of them. I now know of and about some of my relatives who are distant in the world and at various distances on my family tree. Through a DNA testing and genealogy service, I’ve connected with a few distant cousins—1,327 so far! I learned that my ancestry includes many more ethnic groups than the Slovak, Lithuanian, and Polish I knew of growing up. I learned that I descend from people from many places in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. I also learned that I have cousins living all over the world. Besides the United States, Slovakia, Lithuania, and Poland like I might have guessed, they live in Austria, Belarus, Canada, Croatia, Czechia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and more… I never realized how widespread the branches of my family tree are.
As Grandma Gorda said, I may never meet them, but we are related. Now I care about and pray for them all.
Actually if you think about it, all families are connected. A family tree technically shows only direct ancestors—who someone is descended from, like parents and grandparents. But a genogram includes everyone who is related, including siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles, and so on. It shows how family trees connect. And they all eventually connect.
Yes, all of them.
All humans are related. So every single person I meet is my relative somehow. Every single person outside my immediate family is still a relative. Everyone else on this planet is a cousin of mine. And yours. Ours. I’ve heard it said that we are “all connected” or “all one.” Well, in this way, we are. One family.
Words of Nature, Nature of Words
Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby.
—Langston Hughes
Rain is falling, ever so softly.
I once saw rain lighter than this, so light that it sparkled. It was as if there were tiny fairies, or fireflies, or sprites in each droplet.
I later learned it can happen when several conditions are present and lined up just so. In order to see the sparkles, a person has to be in the right place at the right time as well. I’m not seeing that magical rain at the present. But, right now, I’m in a place and moment of time that feels pretty wondrous too.
I’m sitting out on a screened and covered lanai which is surrounded by a wall of tall, colorful crotons. I feel as if I’m lovingly nestled and sheltered from the rain in a private outdoor room. This feeling is reminding me of a word I just learned. It stands for the blissful tranquility that some people feel when it’s raining or storming and they are enjoying and appreciating indoor womb-like coziness. That word is chrysalism. There’s a specific word for today’s light rain too. It’s sirimiri or “drizzle” in Spanish.
I’ve recently been discovering what are sometimes called “rare” nature words. They’re rare because most people didn’t learn them growing up and they are not in common use. It’s not as if we need these words for everyday interactions; I may never use them in ordinary conversation. But I feel enriched just hearing them.
Psithurism is the sound of wind through trees. A low muffled sound