In June 2008, I got one of those phone calls that you know might come one day but you’re never really prepared for. My 90 year old grandmother had been rushed to the hospital with symptoms of what we would soon find out was a massive stroke. She survived for a month and a few days after the event. What she taught me in those few days will stay with me for a lifetime.
Granny was the matriarch of my dad’s family. My grandfather had become an ancestor before my brother, the eldest grandchild, was born. She was all the things you’d hope grannies would be: soft, cuddly, a great cook, mother to anyone who needed one. She was a stewardess in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and every summer, for two weeks straight, she’d cart off a handful or more of her grandchildren to Vacation Bible School (VBS) and bring us back home with her until our parents picked us up in the evening. There was never a time I was in my Granny’s house with her when I was not fed.
I loved to be in the kitchen with her when she cooked. I learned to make…almost everything by watching her measure nothing except by sight and the size of her fist. Essential ingredients in every dish were the vibrations of love from her humming, swaying and singing into each bowl or pot. By the time she was 90, I was pretty sure that I had successfully learned her secrets for making what I loved most: cornbread, a pot of greens, macaroni and cheese, and my favorite after-VBS meal – homemade sloppy joes. Little did I know, some magic had slipped by me, undetected.
While Granny was recovering in the hospital, she tasked me and one of my cousins with what, to us, sounded absolutely absurd. “Listen, I want you to go to my house,” she said, “and go out the back door. Down in the yard along the fence on the left hand side, there’s a plant growing taller than the mint. It’s poke sallat. I need you to pick me some and cook them in a pot of greens and bring the greens and the pot licker to me. It’s gonna make me better.”
Completely confused by what she’d just said, we asked her to repeat it while also doing what any 21st century grandchild worth their salt would do – we Googled it!
Watercolor and gouache painting of bright green young poke sallat plant growing out of brown soil.
It only got more confusing as she emphatically repeated her precise instructions because, well, according to Grandma Google, poke sallat or American pokeweed is poisonous to humans. We read Granny what we were finding and tried to comfort her as she got more and more agitated with us. We told her we couldn’t fulfill her request because we didn’t want to do anything to harm her. She furrowed her brow and pursed her lips the way she always did when she was “vexed” as she would say. We knew she was mad and thought, for sure, all of this must be misguided thinking brought on by the stroke. We never cooked Granny’s greens and poke salat. And she died in early July.
Many years later, I purchased a house in February. I closed on the sale on February 28th and it just didn’t feel like the right time to move in so I waited to see what did feel like an auspicious date to move in. March 21st dropped into my consciousness so I called the movers and set things in motion to move that day. The night before the weather forecast was looking grim. Snow was coming and the movers double checked with me to see if I still wanted to move. I did. It was the first full day of spring after the equinox and who cared about a little snow. This was my auspicious day (for reasons I did not yet know) and so, we moved in the slushy snow.
When the moving van doors slammed shut, I watched them drive off from the warm, toasty inside of the house. I looked around at all the boxes that signaled the final leg of this life transition and it hit me. The day was auspicious because it was March 21, 2018. It would have been Granny’s 100th birthday! I smiled the hardest, cheek-hurting smile and danced around the house with joy knowing that she had blessed this move, that she had blessed me by being with me still from the other side of the veil that separates the living from the ancestors.
In a few days the snow melted and I could see the daffodils already growing in the back garden. On Mother’s Day, I planted mint to honor her. And in the days that followed I walked around the little plot of land that get to steward, curious about who else was growing here. I saw this curious little plant with bright green leaves growing here and there close to ground and I wished that there were an app I could use to identify it. Grandma Google delivered! I used the Plantin app to take a picture of the plant and nearly passed out when the app identified…poke sallat. American pokeweed. Growing in my backyard.
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