The avocado yielded easily to the knife and fell open in my hand, revealing its luscious green fruit—and its nice brown pit.
I never cut open an avocado without remembering my grandmother and the request she made of me.
As a single, young adult into growing houseplants, I discovered that avocado plants could be grown from those pits. My grandmother and I were talking about avocados. I don’t recall that we were eating one. That would have been terribly out of place in her kitchen. But growing plants and flowers was not at all foreign to her.
She had never heard of being able to growing an avocado plant. “Would you root one for me?” she asked.
I was startled, but not because her question was unusual.
It was that she asked me to do something for her.
Our relationship shifted with her question. All my life, she had been the giver; I had been the taker.
She was present at my birth to help me transition into this world. She was present for me the rest of her life.
She baked teacakes for me when I visited. I hasten to add, that I wasn’t the only one for whom she prepared special food. Her homemade biscuits, made by drawing in flour as needed from the bowl it lined—adding milk and whatever else it was she put in her biscuits—were the best I’ve ever tasted, especially with butter and cheese or molasses in them. They were ready every morning when I awoke.
She gave my cousins and me the “run of the house” when we visited. I don’t recall her ever being upset with anything we did.
As we grandchildren graduated from high school and headed to college, she quilted each of us a half-bed size quilt.
She continued doing whatever I asked, such as crocheting a cap for one of my ancient dolls I was restoring. When my own child was a toddler, she gave me the gift of reading But No More Elephants, to him. I have the picture. She gave me, in her own handwriting, her recipe for those much-loved teacakes. (Like most cooks of her day, it was all in her head and she left something out as she wrote it down. Oversight or on purpose?)
Other than the avocado plant, she made one other request of me. The first night after my grandfather died, she refused to go to bed, saying she would just stretch out on the couch. It was a hard, plastic covered couch. Mother and I insisted she needed to sleep in her own bed. Finally, she looked at me and said, “Will you sleep with me?” I gladly gave that gift.
But, the last gift on the list was once again hers to me. She joined my family and me at my house for the first Christmas after my grandfather’s death. It was the first time she had ever celebrated Christmas away from her home.
Who knew what you can find in an avocado pit.
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