Snapdragons. A Eulogy of Sorts.

I think I will grow Snapdragons in my garden next year. 

My wife’s Grandma left this life and joined the next one last week. In one of the last conversations she had with Kelly, she talked about the Snapdragons that she had in the garden (or yard, if you prefer) of the house she once lived in.

Kelly was telling her about the garden that I’ve been attempting to occupy my time with while the Coronavirus stalks its indiscriminate path across the country and the world. Kelly’s grandma, Diane asked if I had Snapdragons, on account of those same flowers growing at one time in her own yard. Kelly said that no, I didn’t and probably thought no more about it; but the comment stayed with with me and I resolved to plant Snapdragons the first moment that presented itself.

A strange thing happened to me when we moved into our house, eighteen months or so ago, I started wanting to garden. That desire, in itself, is not such a strange thing to be motivated by, you might think. I would, in most cases be inclined to agree, but until this moment I had never really had a desire to garden or cultivate anything, not even a humble window box.

Suddenly though, here I found myself, with my own private space, my own land for the first time in my life and quite out of the blue, I wanted to garden. I longed to plant pretty perennials along the periphery of a garden path, I ached to grow ardent annuals all through the gently controlled chaos of a herbaceous border, I hankered after home grown herbs. All of a sudden, all I wanted was a hoe in one hand and a garden fork in the other, to create a sanctuary away from the pressures of the world, a still place filled with beauty and serenity.

At first, as I puzzled over this, I thought my desire must come from growing up in my parents’ garden. My mother always had, in my opinion, a lovely garden; a difficult task, as the soil, at times is little better than brown coloured sand. Still, with my father’s help, she made it beautiful, the perfect combination of a flower filled garden and playground of imaginary worlds for four children to grow up in. It was beautiful and it was, though we didn’t feel so at the time, as idyllic a garden as suburban children in a gently declining industrial town in the North of England could have asked for. 

It wasn’t the memories of this garden that were driving me, I realised, after some thought. My parents garden though altered somewhat from when I lived and played in it, is still there. It still exists. My grandparents garden, on the other hand, is gone forever. 

It took me a while to realise this, as much as anything because it surprised me. In hindsight, it shouldn’t have really, the neighbourhood that we now live in is not really anything like the one I grew up in, whereas the plethora of mature trees dotted throughout our neighbouring streets remind me, on a daily basis, of the large oak tree that grew in my grandparents back garden.

I feel the connection to my grandparents is deeper than just a vague familiarity found in the landscape of  our neighbourhood. They are gone, my parents are still alive. My grandparents story on this earth and in this life is finished but I still remember them. 

I think Kelly sometimes can’t understand the pictures that I have in my head of what I want our land to look like, sometimes she gets frustrated, many times, I’m sure, she wonders why it matters so much to me. I struggle to articulate my feelings in those moments. I’m sure that part of the answer to that question is found in the memory of my grandparents. My grandparents never saw my life here, my grandma dying not long after I met Kelly, my grandpa reading postcards that I would send him of all the things that I did in my first years here but he never stood here and saw it in the flesh.

I can’t copy their garden, I can’t recreate it anew in another place on another continent, but as I work on it, I always ask myself, “would my grandpa have liked it?”

I’m nearing forty now, a passage of time that seems to have passed at an alarming rate, and all my grandparents are gone. I am no longer a part of the youngest generation of my family. Time keeps moving, there are nieces and nephews who are nearly as tall as my diminutive self and I realise that the task of keeping my grandparents memory alive falls, in some part, to me, even if I do it obliquely and in my own way through landscaping and planting schemes. One day I will have to the same task for my parents also, then finally someone will do it for me.

My wife’s grandma’s house is gone now, they knocked it down not long after she moved into assisted living for the ignominious purpose of extending the car-lot of the local Culver’s fast food restaurant. As I write this I’m sat at my in-laws kitchen table in their house, which is over one hundred and thirty years old, with pictures of Kelly’s grandma, Diane covering the surface in front of me. Her high school diploma is here and her yearbook. A “Senior Memories” booklet from her last year at high school which she filled in with name of the class president and the Homecoming Game “Royalty” and other such details also finds its place on the wooden surface of the table.

I am only the Grandson-in-law, the husband of her only granddaughter, I didn’t know her all that long, Kelly and I having found each other later in life than some. There are many grandparents who would care little for who their grandchild’s significant other was but they were not Mrs Diane L. Bredehoft of Red Wing, Minnesota, who, it seemed to me, never ran out of space in her heart for other people, who constantly longed to know how you were doing, the one member of my wife’s family who called me by the diminitive form of my name, Steve, even though Kelly told her otherwise. A woman who longed most of all to be remembered.

A lady like her is not easily forgotten, in the same way that I find my gardening is driven by the memory of my grandparents, so the love, care and acceptance of an entire family is and still will be, driven by her memory. Somewhere in the distant future, when we are gone and my nieces and nephews are grandparents themselves, their grandchildren will be blessed by the memory of Grandma Diane.

She was a woman of simple speech, which is often so much more comforting than all the fancy words we writers use. Still I would use eloquence to describe her, even though I would lay down all my talents just to be able to colour a colouring book with her skill. Alas I can’t, so I will write my thoughts here and next year make sure Snapdragons bloom in my garden.