Cleopatra Mathis

My grandfather immigrated from Greece in 1921 with two baby fig trees he smuggled through Ellis Island. One of those trees thrived throughout my childhood. One of my first memories is of my papou holding me up into its branches and pointing to the figs ripe enough to pick. He perched me on a branch and I placed the figs, one by one, into his old soft brown fedora.  As I grew up, I realized that what he grew in his garden, as well as many of the flowering plants, were the center of his life and kept him rooted in Mytilene, the home he never really left. As well as his beloved fig tree, there were two olive trees, four kinds of peppers, and many eggplants. The small property was completely disguised by garden, laid out meticulously with small paths we were not permitted to run on. He surrounded the house with oleander bushes whose pink, red, and white flowers he warned me never to touch. 

I never knew the name oleander or fig. Never knew any of those southern plants with their English names—only the Greek ones I was raised with. But by the time I was 8, I lived to be outdoors, in a place that in memory seems like perpetual summer. Up by six and armed with a peanut butter sandwich, I was out by the marshy creek creating frog houses under the swamp trees and mossy estuaries that trapped the crawfish. Or when I was sad, I’d climb into the mimosa, what I called my tree, reading for hours—another tree my grandfather planted. 

I surround myself with plants now, for comfort and for beauty, having learned many of the varieties I live with in this northern climate, loving both the Latin and the common names. Sometimes a familiar color or shape can make me cry. But I think I am crying for my past. For those Greek versions of the natural world that my grandfather, with his love, instilled in me.