"Conversations from the Tree Line"

“Conversations from the Tree Line”


You could say my grandpa was a well-mannered man; he minded his peas and cukes (and his taters, too.) He was an avid gardener and while I don’t believe he had any master formulas or secret potions for cultivating mammoth cabbages, he just really enjoyed the quiet time the peas and cukes provided. He could rattle and rant to the butter lettuce and the acorn squash never talked back or offered its opinion on the attack on Pearl Harbor. Grandpa was a World War II veteran, who like many, found any political conversation a catalyst that sparked memories in him that were too painful to talk over with people who didn’t share his experience. He would get up silently from his chair by the kitchen window and walk to the coat rack by the back door where he would put his “work” jacket on. In a matter of seconds the front door would slam shut behind him. My brother and I would run down the hallway into the back bedroom and slowly draw back a sliver of curtain to see where he had stomped off to. The previously jolly man could be seen through the back bedroom window marching towards the edge of the woods where his garden was neatly staked. I never understood fully as a kid what had triggered his abrupt removal from the room, but there must have been something about the peace he found in the neatly lined rows of vegetables that soothed his heart when the invisible wolf threatened to blow down the door of his mind. He could be seen at the edge of his plot wiping his eyes and then his eyeglasses with a dirty bandana he would pull from his jacket pocket before he put them back on and commenced to tending his garden fare; talking to peas, and stroking their leaves.

He loved that backyard and in the winters of northern Minnesota when the ground is frozen solid, the open space that made up the garden in summer, became the landing spot for the snow slides he would tirelessly engineer in the winter for his gaggle of grandchildren. The slick snow chutes would begin on the slope near the back of the house and barrel for what seemed the length of half a football field until it reached the garden plot where a makeshift snow bank would stop a toboggan dead in its fiery tracks. In winter when conversations would come up at the kitchen table between the adults, be it a school referendum or governor’s race, Grandpa responded to the red flag in his brain that popped up and said, “This might make you think about war. Hit Eject.” He would walk to the coat rack near the front door and slip into his winter getaway garb; a red and black buffalo-check wool jacket. He would pull on his large rubbery winter boots and top off his below-zero getup with a bomber hat that sported furry ear flaps and made him look like a Russian nutcracker. He would open the door and it would slam behind him. From the same back bedroom window in another season, he was but a set of footprints in the crunchy snow.

This time of the year, when his garden was sleeping under blankets of hard-packed fluff, he would find solace in spraying the snow slide with water from the hose and patching holes in its winding channel. He could be seen between November and March, patting and smoothing the speed tunnel with the woolen mittens that warmed his gentle and sturdy hands. My grandma would exclaim how worried she was about the treacherous length of that slide and how slippery it had to be. She reckoned that we might just shoot ourselves into the neighboring county if we actually got on it! I don’t remember going down that slide too many times. We were all frightened by its slick, shiny walls and its never-ending length. My brother and I feared the snow bank that was to catch us near the end would somehow bust away as our bobsled battle-ram careened through its wall and we would be swallowed up by the slight tree line that was the last defense from the river’s edge. My grandpa spent hours and hours constructing and renovating his bobsled speedway winter after winter. Every winter he was sure if he added one more meter of mayhem to the slide, one more layer of lightening, more of his grandchildren would come and enjoy what he had carefully crafted. He waited tirelessly for grandchildren who never visited. He drank blackberry brandy from smudged tumblers at his place in the corner of the kitchen waiting for a familiar car to pull in. They never did and he kept waiting.

Too young to understand the dichotomy of war and the minds of men who waged them, in all four seasons we would see my grandpa wandering away from conversations. We would want to be near him, even if we didn’t know how to help him or what we were helping him with. When the first robin could be heard chirping and the ground was damp and cool, we would race to the same front door and throw on our sneakers and windbreakers and sprint down the slight hill between the house and garage to meet up with him. He would look up and wave us down to meet him. In the time it had taken us to make a pitcher of kool-aid, grandpa had already waded through the muck of war, knee-deep in decapitated strangers, unclaimed limbs, and the carnage in which his innocence was ground to slop.

This strong, Swedish man, who was large and ruddy, became a tender of the young in his garden, be it to the human kind or the vegetable kind. He would carefully instruct us on how to tell if a carrot was ready for plucking or if the string beans still needed more time. He pointed us to the pails when he had found something we could pick and take inside to eat. There were times in the short Minnesota summers that my brother and I would go into the garden alone without my grandpa. If he was inside napping, we would try to surprise him by doing all of his work for him not realizing the garden was a want-to and not a need-to for him. We would feverishly pick carrots, immature and puny, and toss them into our buckets as if we were racing each other down the soiled ruts in an attempt to speed-clean our rows of the leafy produce. We dug and dug and dug. My grandpa would get up after his nap and come outside only to see that we had made mincemeat of his carrot rows. I am not sure why we loved to dig for carrots, but we did! He would then ask us if he could see what we had picked. We would become overjoyed to show him the sandy loot we had amassed in our metal pails. We were the masters of the baby carrot concept and he never reprimanded us for taking his vegetables out prematurely. He would just smile and tell us we better get them inside to be washed so we could start eating them. My grandpa was sturdy, yet gentle and readily forgave two naïve kids like my brother and me for prematurely and carelessly reaping the fruits of his labor.

My grandpa found peace in his rows of dirt. Perhaps it served as a makeshift graveyard where the blackberry brandy held the flashlight in the blackness while he dug the holes that he would fill with the bones of young men. The memories of faceless boys he had called brothers, would be set in the soil, one at a time, summer after summer in the wormy dirt. In the glint of the new spring sun, they would extend their hands to him from the moist beyond in the form of tender asparagus shoots and somewhere between heaven and hell, grandpa’s pain was suffocated for the season.

Grandpa is dead and his house sits empty. The garden is now covered with a decade of tangled brush and waist-high grass. I overcame my initial hesitation and drove by once last summer on a visit to the area and thought I saw him in the distance, walking the tree line in his work coat and his nutcracker hat. He was laughing, with a glass in his hand, bending and stooping as if inspecting the ground. Like the thaw in spring that signaled sowing season, I knew the thawing of his heart had come and he was free. Just in time for the baby carrots.