Poppies

The wallpaper was patterned with large, blooming red poppies, their leaves and stems curling up and over each other like sage filigree. The tea-stained yellow of the once white background had likely been that shade since my mother was young and ate her dinners here, in the warm dim light of my Nani’s kitchen. The pattern is from an era before me, from times unknowable to me, but everything my Nani owned was so singularly of her, and I knew her. I knew her house and its yard. I knew the big pink blooms of rhododendrons by the sidewalk, always with fat black ants on their thick, sticky stalks. I knew the Concord grapes by the backdoor, the ones that my sisters and I would slip inside our mouths, bursting them with our teeth so that the skins would slide off, leaving a soft, fleshy orb on our tongues, the center a mass of crunchy seeds. We would sit on the rough pebble cement table beneath the wooden arbor and pluck them from the vine, de-skinning them and spitting the insides so that they stuck onto the vinyl siding of our grandmother’s home until she would yell at us to stop. I knew the playground across the street, its yellow and green jungle gyms rusting so badly that they left crinkled blooms of red-brown dust on our palms when we traversed them; I knew the shady, wooded area behind the park, which covered all of thirty square feet but seemed like an endless dark forest when I was a child.

For so many Saturdays, I was here, sitting at the kitchen table with Nani, my mother, and my older sisters. She would cook an enormous amount of food — “enough for an army,” my father would say on the very rare occasions that he accompanied us. The table would be crowded with heaping bowls of round ravioli, homemade red sauce and meatballs cooked over the course of two days so that the pork was so soft it would crumble on your tongue, and grated Parmesan cheese that I would steal pinched fingers full of, so salty that it made the roof of my mouth itch. After dinner, we would have fried dough stuffed with cheese that we dipped in granulated sugar, while I watched and listened closely to the girls and women of my life as they sat and talked, hoping that the sun would stay up and my mother would forget that we had to go home. I would listen quietly, to hear all the names of people who were somehow linked to me by blood but whom I had never met, learning about their lives and watching my mother, together with the woman who had raised her, now herself grown, raising her own children.

The idea of “growing up” to be like them, in any way, seemed impossible. They gave love, guidance and support where it was needed, while I was the one desperately hungry for that love, guidance and support. They had answers where I had endless questions and deep, rattling uncertainty. When they held me, rocked me, and whispered into my hair that it would be ok, I knew that it would.

What seemed like an intrinsic, ancient knowledge within them was as vast and expansive to me as the patch of trees behind the playground, as unknowable in its origin as the poppy wallpaper in the kitchen. As I grew older, married, and began to age past the years that had marked their entrances to motherhood, I retained this feeling. I feared I was made of the wrong stuff for it. Motherhood. But it is there, in all those Saturdays spent on Lynde Street, willing the sun to stay hovering at the horizon. In all of the quiet moments watching my grandmother do crosswords in her sunroom, all the songs and sayings that soothed me when crying and scared with skinned knees and bee stings.