My grandmother puckers her lips from side to side as she surveys the cards; her thin hands slide gently over the calico oilcloth, wrinkling to and fro as she fingers the familiar objects of her life. Her husband shuffles in and pinches her loose cheek before returning to the balcony. I have long tired of this game but it is the only pastime that makes sense. She doesn't understand any part of my life: why I would travel anywhere in Europe other than to her industrial hometown; why I eat pork and beef while my mother rejected it for decades; why I knit and shower every day; why I don't need my underwear ironed; why I would study biology or plants or writing; why I have a dog, or tend a garden.
I draw ounces of courage from the far corners of my skin and heart (the emotional distance is an aching in my chest): "When did you move here?"
The card game disintegrates.
The harvest begins with a single ear of corn: shucking awkwardly reveals pearls of periwinkle and goldenrod kernels. It was just a few years before my mother was born, the last child. Stuck with a sour inlaw in a shattered, German, post-war town, they fled to the city where her husband would get work in the factory.
I fumble less with the next question, and the kernels spill out in every direction, filling the static apartment with fear, and love, and hunger. They are simple stories, but they are all inside of her. She has loved, but is cold from someplace inside. The questions break her open, and my grandfather cries a little, later on, when he comes in from the balcony, filling in the blanks.
The connection is sparse, but I learned how to husk.
Just in time.
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