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by Catherine Harper
I find that I have an image of a grandmother in my mind. A long-nosed, sharp-faced woman with hair mostly silver but still a little black. A woman with a roomy kitchen, and a pantry full of bins and canisters but innocent of cardboard packages. She has a cabinet full of carefully tended but ill-matched and cryptically labeled bottles of herbs and spices, and she can cook anything, though for the most part without reference to written recipe or even measure, and whenever I enter her kitchen she offers me a cup of soup, a slice of bread or some other relic of the day's cooking.
She, of course, has a garden - probably not manicured or labeled, and perhaps erratically tended, but a source of greens for the pot, tomatoes for salad sauce, cans, herbs, parsnips for pie and some great wealth of other things that I don't always recognize. She has fruit trees that are as old and stubborn as she is. They don't fruit as heavily as they once did, and every January she swears that it's time to take a few of them out and put in new trees - big ones, she says, because she doesn't have time to wait for them to grow up. Every February, she bullies the teenaged son of her neighbors into pruning the old ones and lets them stay another year. There have been, I think, generations of these teenaged boys.
When she goes, she walks with a cane, but I suspect that this is less for her faltering feet and more because of a gut feeling that a heavy stick is never a bad thing to have close to hand. Outdoors for every plant that grows she has a name, many of them ones that have never been found in botany texts and a few that she has made up - I don't know which ones, and perhaps she doesn't either. She has watched one year's twig fall, and another thicken into a branch, and sometimes joggers have overheard her making lewd jokes to the neighborhood tomcat.
"Grandmother" is one of those words that vibrates in the pagan community like a plucked string. If you listen to a gathering of pagans late at night, almost always you'll hear the stories of a grandmother, a grandfather, the spinster great-aunt once removed. The uncle who was a water witch, the great-grandmother's younger sister who might have been a lesbian. There is a sense that we are leafing back through the histories looking for our own people. Sometimes the hunger has been so great we have created grandmothers where none have existed, giving rise to the well-worn, even clichéd pagan legends.
I never met either of my grandmothers. One I know little about. "She was a saint," they say. Her husband was not a saint. She raised four boys, at least one of whom did not remain close to the family, and died when I was young.
My other grandmother, my mother's mother, has haunted my life through my mother's recollections of her. She loved to cook, designed costumes for ballet and made many of her own formal dresses (sometimes skirting local standards of decency). She was stylish and imposing - I am told she looked like me, though I have not been told I inherited her sense of taste - drank heavily, had many lovers and seems to have been at best an indifferent mother. She could, I was told, taste a dish once and recreate it at home, a talent I have perhaps inherited, or perhaps have merely reconstructed, having heard in her story that it was possible. She was at least somewhat interested in the occult, though whether idly or otherwise I can not say. In the stories I have been told, she has three main qualities: She was talented, she was terrible, and she was very much like me. She makes a marvelous myth, and yet I think it an injustice to both of us that we never met nor had the chance to work out our own understandings. In trying to make other stories about this woman, stories from in between the lines of my mother's fear and ambivalence, she bore some of the seeds that became my fictional grandmother.
She came from a line of other strong and wicked women. Strangely, this was the part of my maternal heritage that I ignored the longest. My Irish great-grandmother was apparently another saint. (Saints, I gather, have gradually become less common; the further you look back in time the more frequently they appear.) I always knew I was Irish, and my almost-black hair and pale skin, following my mother's red hair and freckles, seemed to support that story. That another branch of the family was Spanish-speaking settlers of California was something more distant, only half-recalled until one day while filling out my taxes I started wondering what "Hispanic" meant, exactly. I was in my twenties before I consciously realized that my Irish mother had always spoken to me, a little, in Spanish. It was only this year that I learned that this was not something she studied in college or something she picked up while traveling in South America but something they always spoke a bit around the home.
Of course, when it comes to studying the history of an oppressed people, it should be noted that my maternal ancestors seem to have done a fairly thorough job maintaining their position as oppressors. My three-times-over great-grandmother (or possibly great-aunt) was particularly noted for her ill-treatment of her Native American workers - not to mention that she is credited with having been encouraged to whip them by her parents when she was a child, to work off her temper - as well as her business acumen. She was also called the most beautiful woman in South California, though her great wealth may have added to her allure. It is from her line that I inherited some of the most interesting items, like the delicate silver utensils with figures of bat demons wrapped around the handles. And it was in pictures of her descendants that I first saw people who really looked like me.
There are other people who filled some of the roles in my magical life that are so commonly attributed to grandmothers. An old woman - almost 90 to my 6 or so when we met - who lived on the corner of my block with about 20 cats, the woman who taught me a little of a system of astrology I have never seen anywhere else and gave me (among many gifts) the porcelain figures of cats, one black, one white, that became the centerpiece of my first altar. The Theosophist parents of one of my best friends, who exposed me to everything from archery to gardening, read Tolkien aloud and seemed to have a greater store of household rituals than had survived in my family. These people too, have a place in this page, because in calling out what they did I can start to call out what I mean by grandmother.
When I turn back to my fictional grandmother, I feel like I am reaching for a connection with the past. I want to ask her, ask him, ask them, "What do our people eat, Grandma? How do we make bread? Are we an olive oil family? A butter family? What herbs do you need in your garden? How do you know when to plant your garden, Grandma? How do you make your children grow, and keep your people safe?
"Who are we?"
I have only one recipe from my maternal grandmother, a woman who was famed for her cooking. I have one or two more from her husband. And if I could ask her those questions, not all of her answers could be mine.
When my family visits me, usually within a few minutes someone asks me if I happen to have any food handy, and I end up rummaging around for a few slices of yesterday's bread, a little dish of caponata or the chicken that was braised with leeks. I used to tease them about this, but as the novelty wore off I began to notice how happy this made me, and that these were notes that played in harmony with the tune of grandmother. It is something I'm becoming more sensitive to, as I begin to wonder how we will raise our children. I want to be able to raise them with a sense of identity and cultural continuity, but my own sense of such things is not so much one I was given as much as one I pieced out of discarded bits, something that I've tried to breathe life into.
A grandmother is something I want to have, but it is also something I want to give. In a few years - perhaps a very few years - we might have children. Grandchildren are only a dream, but family, the families we are born to, the families we have chosen, are already here. Already I have hungry people to welcome into my kitchen. Someday I want to teach my nephew how to refresh a levain and make bread, or discuss with him what herbs might be most efficacious against nightmares. Someday I'd like to ask my own child to grab me some oregano from the garden, knowing that she, or he, knows exactly where to go and what to look for.
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