From the Imagination of Dr. Nicki: Real Life - Stories I Never Knew... Part 12
As I present Part 12 today of my "Stories I Never Knew...", I have discovered that there are actually two more installments left! So Wednesday, October 5, 2016 will be the big finale!!
Over the course of these past two weeks, I've been presenting this 14-part fictional blog story as a part of my blog entitled, "From the Imagination of Dr. Nicki"… Spotlighting original fiction by me. These stories never happened… They are original fiction pieces from my imagination. I hope you are enjoying it. Today, I present PART 12. If you missed any of the previous parts, here are those links to read first:
Sixteen years to the day my Grandma Lollie died, I awoke from an irretrievable dream, crying. Shivering against the tender, worn thin blue blanket, I blinked off the mixture of sleep and tears.
I know when we first began talking I told you how Grandma Lollie had never been my favorite. Because I was the girl who always needed lots of hugs, I guess, and my Grandmother was simply too focused to stop for such things.
Still, there had been moments...and as I lay there on that blurry spring morning grandmother’s image appeared as a vision, floating before me like a gardenia in a shallow bowl of water. She was kneeling upon soft earth. A small spade was in her hand and brightly colored flowers in tiny pots surrounded her. With lips tight against her teeth, brow furrowed like a farmer’s field, piano legs peeking out from her waist-less dull-colored shmata, she dug in the fine dirt making room for the new bright life.
Thinking of Grandmother in the garden invariably makes me cock my head like an attentively listening pup. There was something so incongruous about it, in a way - and, at the same time, something so right. The flowers, she said, were for the eyes. The vegetables, for the stomach. “When you eat right from the earth,” she’d proclaim nearly every time her hands were washed with dirt, “you grow strong like the earth itself. So, find the place where the flowers grow good and where the vegetables get ripe and strong. By this, you will understand the road ahead and the road behind. I am here many years and if nothing else, these things I know. Life is about this. Nothing more, nothing less. L’chaim. ” Often she’d say this final word as if pronouncing a sacred prayer, rolling it around in her mouth like she was savoring the juicy aftertaste of some exquisite fruit. Then, she’d briefly look at me the way someone does who sees you not at all – her eyes misted with memory. “What are you thinking about, grandma?” I would occasionally venture. But she’d only shake her head and press her bottom lip more tightly against her teeth until it was obvious that the memory glimpsed had fled.
There’s something about Jews and their sense of sacred soil - a deep trust that, for everything, God has a particular resting place in mind, if only we can claim it. We, too, who have been chosen to spread His name and tell His story must find the place where we can grow ripe and strong.
That morning of the shivering tears I knew I must go to celebrate my Grandmother’s kind of faith. I arose and dressed carefully, as if for ceremony. Then, taking hold of the old spade, I went softly into the garden.
Comments
Post a Comment