Harvest brings memories of the mystery and fun of Grandma's yard

I don’t remember much about my Grandma Brander. I know she married Sylvan Brander. I know she moved her young family of boys from Sioux Falls, SD to Compton, CA in the 1950s and I know my Grandma Brander had a unique way of embarrassing my father. She was big and so was her impact on me.

Everything to me seemed bigger when I was a kid, and maybe even bigger than most because I was a small suburban child with no hands-on experience in the big world of wild life, human or landscape.

I do remember a few other special things, however, that make my Grandma Brander’s memory timeless and cherished to me.

I’m guessing I was young – early elementary school probably.

I arrived with my family to visit grandma in her mid 1900s house on “D” Street – the spooky one located in a “bad neighborhood” decorated with gargantuan trees on both sides of the road that held hands in the street’s center and made arriving demand courage.

Walking into Grandma Brander’s house was like entering a dark, enchanted forest where Hansel and Gretel surely got lost. It was a place of small rooms, dark walls and homemade crochet doilies with ruffled stand-up edges that framed figurine jewels made out of priceless glass.

The perfectly polished, two-tier living room telephone end tables supported rippled potato chip lampshades, tarnished by time and the cigarette smoke of my dad and three uncles.

Grandma Brander’s house was a dustless, immaculate domicile of still air and museum relics.

But grandma’s mausoleum had a door. And beyond that door, a fenced backyard wilderness called relentlessly with its seductive child song that overwhelms those that hear it.

It was a song with lyrics that begged me to smash black olives on the sidewalk and embrace the rough, brown bark protecting the elderly apricot tree, heavy with bows, weighed down even more, nearly kissing the ground with its glorious, ripe gift.

I’m one of those people in life who remembers shards of information, who detects and smells molecular scents of eternal comfort and tastes things so delectable my memory burns its shadow into my palate forever and dares me to find that perfect taste again.

I am in Grandma Brander’s old apricot tree: The cool of the evening cloaking my arms, the joy of effortlessly pulling myself up its trunk, planting myself on a branch like a bird and tasting the individual fingerprint of beauty alive in that fruit. 

I am creating a singular perfect life memory I don’t care to erase, modify or make accurate by others. 

It’s been at least 45 years since that memory etched its way into my story.

Today at lunch I rediscovered it. 

I spent my lunch hour in a co-worker’s yard picking low fruit off her apricot tree. I stood under its mature, low-branches hugging me, hungry bees surrounding me while I picked apricots.

After 45 years I was a child in Grandma Brander’s apricot tree, the compelling urge to taste God’s beautiful sun-ripened gift took control. 

I opened my mouth like a child and breathed in the scent; reached out and tasted the perfect lovely memory of Grandma Brander.

It reminded me of how much I wished I knew more of Grandma Brander, the one beyond the dark, still air that existed between our family and her. 

I suspect that beyond all my father’s embarrassment, a one-of-a-kind, Go-Go-boot and red mini-skirt wearing woman with a fragrant, perfect gift to offer was waiting for me to find her.

Michelle Lovato is a reporter for the Lake County Leader and has 25 years experience as a professional writer.