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Rosa is the only grandmother I ever had. She is not the rocking kind. She has never called me, baked me cookies or kept me for a weekend. When I was a child, she and my grandfather retired and moved to a mobile home in a rural community 20 miles from us.

A few times a year, we visited them. Grandma Rosa made heavy, delicious Swiss dinners, inspected our scalps and lectured us about vegetables, and, then, while the grown-ups sat stiffly on the artificial-turf-covered porch, we kids ran across the street to the alfalfa field.

When I was older, she would take me around her garden, a series of raised beds surrounding the trailer. She grew kohlrabi, Swiss chard, radishes and rhubarb, and grapevines trained on wires all around. But after an hour or so, she would indicate that it was time for us to go.

When I married your father, my Swiss grandfather didn't seem to mind that my husband was a very tall brown-skinned man. In fact, after family dinners at my mother's, my 5-foot-4 grandfather would sidle over to 6-foot-4 Dwayne and whisper in his heavily accented English, "You could probably reach that schnapps they keep in the cabinet up there over the stove, eh, son?"

But maybe Grandmother Rosa didn't like it. Who knows? She saw your sisters once at Thanksgiving and then, for years, she didn't see anyone. But a few years ago, after my grandfather died at age 89, my mother started to visit her stepmother again, driving out to the same mobile home garnished with parsley and grapevines.

When I was pregnant with you, I knew your father wouldn't be around much longer. I sat in this same chair where I sit now, writing names on pieces of paper like I did for your sisters. Gaila is named for both your grandmothers -- Gail and Alberta. Delphine is named for a tall, lovely flower. And you -- I wanted you to be as beautiful and hardy and ever blooming as a rose. I tried out names: Rose was too old-fashioned, Rosita and Rosina and Rosie weren't right. Rosa was my step-grandmother's name, which might bother my mother.

Rosette. Small, delicate, unusual and French, for my mother's actual birthplace.

When my mother was pregnant, and I was 3, and my father left, she called Rosa, who said she had made her bed and now must lie in it. Rosa did not help her when the baby was born. She did not come to get me or rock anyone to sleep. I don't think your grandmother Gail has ever forgiven her.

Your grandmother Gail is very short, with blue eyes and straight brown hair. You are tall, with cascading black curls and clove-brown eyes. You see your grandmother two or three times a week. Every Tuesday, you go to her house while I work; she doesn't bite your cheeks, but she does puzzles with you, teaches you to make meatballs and knits you vivid sweaters.

I look at you sleeping beside me. You are part African, part Creek and Cherokee, part Irish, part French, part Swiss. You are wholly American. You will be 5 years old in the summer.

You will play the lilting-sad song again, and say to me somberly, "That was for my Grandma Alberta that I never got to see." Does she whisper in your ear, near your plump cheeks?

Last month, Grandma Rosa stunned us by asking your grandmother to bring you on a visit. Only you. She watched you wander among the vegetables, and she mentioned casually to her stepdaughter that Rosette had been her own mother's name. She had never told this to anyone in our family. Her mother was a farm wife who had 12 children and a hard existence, cultivating hilly slopes (the only kind in Switzerland) and raising dairy cows. Of all the children, only Rosa and her sister Anni, still in Switzerland, are still alive.

Do I say, "You are no blood relation to this woman, and I have no idea how this coincidence came about? And how is it that on that visit, when she took you around the garden, you knew so much about flowers and growing?"

When you were 2, you planted red Flanders poppies in our yard, and the tall blooms were so unusual everyone stopped to ask where they came from. "From me," you said proudly. You planted apricot trees from pits, and they grew. You pick fruit, like Fine, and you plant seeds, and you dream of Alberta, stare at her picture.

Recently you said to me, in the garden, "Stop picking at your hands, Mommy." My thumbs and palms have deep bleeding fissures from washing floors and clothes and dishes and girls' long hair. From trimming fruit trees and roses and stray threads from skirts.

Do I tell you about Fine, that I think of her hands, and Rosette of Switzerland's hands, and my own mother's hands, and do I tell you I wonder what your hands will look like when you have children, when I am a grandmother? I have told you many times that I will be the rocking and cooking kind. Will you pick berries in your own wild garden? Will you braid your daughter's hair and say about me, "Your Grandma Susan showed me how to plant roses ..."
salon.com | March 22, 2000

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