At Nanny’s house, Mom spends her time indoors, chats it up with Aunt LaLa, Nanny, and, more often than not, cousin Lucia, and Great-Aunt Lizzie, who trails whispery smoke from a waving cigarette as she walks across the lazy street from her home, up the path alongside Grandpa’s zinnia bed, her flowered housecoat hanging loosely on her soft, round form.

At the end of the summer, when I’m ten years old, Mom takes my sisters and me on a walk while we’re at Nanny’s.  This is kind of unusual, as Mom didn’t take many walks with her four girls.  Instead, she’s always eager to order us to run outside and play, just to get us out of the house.  I don’t mind so much ’cause then I don’t have to listen to her constant nagging.  I know Mom likes peace and quiet.  She’s said so many times.

“Those god-damn kids!” says Mom as we run outdoors, slamming the kitchen door behind us.

Mom was good at nagging about walks.  She rarely gave us rides, sometimes due to the break-down of our car, sometimes not.  We walked to school, from school, to and from church, the park, the beach, the grocery store.

“When I was a kid, I walked everywhere,” she said.

Never mind if you just didn’t feel like walking sometimes.              

Her tone suggests that because she suffers, we must suffer.  So, since she walked, we walked.

This particular day, on a day where you wished the sun felt warmer on your skin, Mom led the way, Indian single-file style, where we followed her on the unmown grassy area that surrounds Uncle Pippi’s garden, along the gray-weathered split rail log fence and the paved roads.  The garden, across the street from Nanny’s house, is on an island-shaped plot of land, surrounded by three roads (the neighborhood was chopped up by the addition of the I-95 Turnpike in the 1950s, cutting off Linden Avenue along one side of the island and splitting the neighborhood of Italian immigrants).  

Uncle Pippi’s end-of-summer garden was almost shut down, the last of the vegetables harvested, seeds stored in a cool, dry place in the garage, garden plants cut to the soil or pulled up entirely by roots, and the compost pile piled up with garden waste.  Plants that showed just a hint of disease were thrown away so as not to contaminate next year’s crop.  A few stragglers of decayed plants will be pulled out tomorrow, and Uncle Pippi’s last chore is to clean and store the tools – the hoe, the rake, the wheelbarrow, the seeder, that rest against a stone wall.  The desolate death of the garden darkens my soul.                 

“Girls, your Daddy and I are getting divorced.  We won’t be living with him anymore.”  said Mom. 

I pull a long piece of wild, dead grass out by its roots and stick it in between my teeth.  It twitches nervously, shivers in my mouth.  I stare at the last of the garden and wonder if Nanny is watching us from the livingroom window in her house across the street.  I can’t look at the house.  I don’t want to see Nanny looking at us.  At me.

“Are we going to live at Nanny’s?” asks Donna, relief in her face, round eyes wondering. 

She is glad that we are finally leaving Daddy.

Me, not so much. 

It might as well be the death of Daddy.  What’s to happen to us?  To me?  My older sister’s words are cold comfort for my breaking heart.

“No, Donna, we’re moving to our own apartment,” said Mom.

It was as simple as that.  On the outside of the garden, looking in, the end-of-summer decay of garden plants, as they wither and dry, turning in for the winter, the last of their old life dusting down to the dirt of Dear, Sweet, Jesus’ earth.

Copyright © Jean DeVito, September, 2024.  All rights reserved.