I didn’t know my maternal grandmother very well. Even though we lived in the same city, we rarely saw each other. My family was aspiring, middle class and professional. My grandmother was poor, illiterate and alcoholic. Both of my parents were second generation immigrants who had grown up during the depression. This left deep scars on their emotional souls. When my mother was a girl her parents took the children’s shoes away when school ended in June, only to be returned in the fall when school started again. Fifty years later my mother couldn’t take her shoes off in our house because it reminded her so compellingly of those barefoot summers.
My grandmother lived in a rundown house on the other side of the city, paid for, I’m sure, by my parents. My mother and I visited occasionally. I don’t ever remember my grandmother coming to our house. She spoke very little English, so verbal communication was impossible. She was Polish and my grandfather was Lithuanian. Neither spoke each other’s language, but they both spoke Russian, since my grandfather was a deserter from the Russian army. So, they spoke Russian to each other; the children spoke Polish to their mother, Lithuanian to their father, and English to each other. Picture the scene when my grandfather was bleeding to death in a hospital corridor and all four languages were going at once, to no avail. He was a scab millworker, a Polack, who cared?
My grandmother had lived a life of such deprivation that her own aliveness was a constant wonderment to her. One of the last times I saw her, I was probably eight, and it was late summer. As we left and walked off the front porch, she turned to the overgrown yard where there was a peach tree, incongruously loaded with fruit.
“Georgie”, she said, except it sounded more like ‘shaajee’
“Look . . . peches” ( peaches).
The abundance of that tree was as magical for her as it was for me. To this day I can’t eat a peach without remembering that moment.
