At the age of ninety-six, Grandma Jenny slipped while shoveling snow off our front steps in a freak snowstorm and broke her hip. She was a feisty little woman who weighed only ninety-five pounds and was four feet nine inches tall. The shovel was bigger than Grandma. You may wonder why she would go out shoveling snow early in the morning at her advanced age, but it was part of her stubborn and cantankerous nature. And it was part of her tradition. She didn’t want my father to go to work and get his feet wet in the snow. It was a matter of respect for the man of the house. It was a matter of faith in her traditions. It was her way.
Grandma was from the old country, Russia to be specific. She arrived in the United States as a fourteen-year-old girl traveling for fifteen days on a steamer and surviving on bread and water. She lost her groceries, her money and her clothes on the journey to thieves who chased after naive and unsuspecting girls like her as a normal part of refugee travel in those days. Most people thought it was the work of greedy crew members. She came to this country penniless and literally with only the clothes on her back. But nothing could stop Grandma from making a new life in the land of her dreams, or bringing with her the rituals and traditions that were an innate part of her heritage, her faith, and her very being. .
Until she slipped and broke her hip, Grandma Jenny had always been in good health. None of us in the family remembered her having a cold. She attributed her good health to a secret potion of elder brandy that she distilled in the attic of our Georgian colonial house. I have no idea where she got her elderberries or how she prepared the concoction. She was never allowed to go up to her special place in the attic to see what she was doing. Everything Grandma did was a secret.
Grandma took a dose of the special potion when she woke up in the morning and when she went to bed at night, so she told us. To my knowledge, it was the only medication she took. On rare occasions, such as holidays and her birthdays, we were all invited to join her for a sip of her elderberry brandy. She was allowed to participate since she was a teenager. The boy made those things a success. No wonder Grandma was never sick. The brandy must have killed the germs. My dad didn’t like it very much. He was a Scotsman. My mother struggled to swallow it. She didn’t drink. We all participate in the ritual. No one in the family was about to insult Grandma Jenny. It was too hard a cookie to play with.
On one of the rare occasions that Grandma Jenny bothered to talk to me, communication was a problem as she only spoke Russian; I asked him what was so special about the secret potion. She half-smiled at me indicating that when I was more mature she would understand, pointing to my head. Grandma was excellent at the universal language of hand signals. I understand a little Russian, but I don’t speak the language. Fortunately for me, Grandma understood English, except when she chose to pretend she didn’t. Even the dog understood Russian because the grandmother fed him and didn’t speak anything. When she called him to come get him in Russian, he came running. No one disobeyed Grandma. The dog was a huge boxer named Slugger. It was amazing to see him cringe in front of my grandmother and wait for her order so he could eat. Surely he did not act like that with my father or with me. He once jumped on my dad and pushed him so hard he fell and dislocated his shoulder. Slugger wouldn’t dare jump on my grandmother.
After Grandma passed away, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what was so special about her secret potion and how to make it. Grandma didn’t like the measurements or the recipes. She insisted that you only add a little bit of this and a little bit of that. She spoke like that when someone wanted to know how to make her yeasted coffee cake or her carrot ginger candy with saffron. Unfortunately, her secrets died with her.
I think I finally have the answer when it comes to his secret potion. It wasn’t the herbs she added. It wasn’t how high the alcohol content was. It was the love with which she made it and she distributed it to the whole family. He represented to her a fusion of old traditions and new rituals. She symbolized her faith in God, and the respect she had for our family and our Country. It was a way of celebrating her freedom. It was her way of communicating with us in a language of kindness and caring that we could all understand.
Sometimes when I have a little brandy late at night to help me calm down from the stresses of the day and the threat of terrorism or natural disasters, I wonder, couldn’t we all use a little of Grandma’s secret potion? to help us overcome these problems? times? The commercial stuff doesn’t seem to work anymore. It lacks the tradition of care, kindness and love necessary to make it a special concoction. It lacks that faith-filled personal touch of Grandma Jenny. She doesn’t have her tenacious character or her will to survive. He lacks respect.
There are some things you can’t just put in a bottle, stick a label on it, and expect it to work miracles. Sometimes you have to find the right ingredients in your own heart. Sometimes you have to distill them yourself. Sometimes the secret potion of faith is within you.