Yours Truly 2017 / Cascadia College / Bothell, WA 2017 YT Online Book | Page 13

Once My Grandmother
Walks Us
Denise Calvetti Michaels
Once my grandmother walks us, hand-in-hand, to the dusty rodeo grounds one mile from
the farm on Natividad. We played here every summer of our childhood, staying with our
paternal grandparents who lived near Salinas Memorial Hospital where I was born and she
did not go when she fell on the porch steps and cut her leg against the boot scraper. We
are too young to understand why she hesitates before entering the grocery store, doubting
her broken English, the clerk who rings up the order, bags her groceries, ice cream, peanut
butter we should have done without; she and my grandfather known for organic gardening
before it has a name. But this is about what we discover wandering four acres; fig trees,
apple orchard, strawberries and wild blackberries, garlic celery onions, tomatoes, escarole,
romaine, kale collard greens and string beans we plant and water ourselves; the double-
yoke brown eggs we collect, the rabbits in hutches, the rosemary and thyme, basil and
carnations, the home grown larder I conjure to remember colors and shapes juxtaposed
within the garden, borders and rows and rows of scents and tastes, vertical lattices, their
braided honeysuckle patterns tantalizing and perhaps a statement of abundance against the
past of my grandparent’s poverty of place, Montaldo Scarampi an Italian village where in the
summer small boys stand naked to the wall and pee the dust to life.
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