what they have to say

Every Sunday, without fail, we drive to visit my dad’s mom in the city, having supper with her, before we drive back to the suburbs, stopping to visit my mom’s parents. As a kid, the first half of this is boring: grow-ups talking, the yard somewhere that’s not safe to play, too much traffic and too many strangers. Sometimes we take a walk, but more often than not it’s everyone sitting around sighing, the world’s going to hell and there’s nothing we can do about it. I sit through it, bringing a book once I’m old enough to read, and —  

I endure, until we come to my mom’s parents.  

Summer or winter, it doesn’t matter — the place for kids is playing, they say, both of them — and so we’re sent to play. Toys out of the toy closet, its rosy-pink door and odd-smelling interior belying the treasures that are inside, or better, out to the garden. The vegetable garden is off-limits to all kids except me (because I respect the plants, my granddad says, gruffly), and so I wander the rows, beans and tomatoes and squash, cucumbers, his garlic patch — admiring plants without touching them, digging carrots only when he tells me that they’re ready, leaving everything else alone. I rinse these at the tap and eat them without waiting, right up to the feathery tops, which I throw onto the compost pile. That’s the rule, per him: “Don’t take my dirt!” (shake them off well, rinse them at the tap), and: “I get the tops!”  

The vegetable garden is great, but it’s the second-best part of the yard. The actual best part, so far as I’m concerned at the tender age of 7, is the rock garden.  

My grandparents are rock collectors, and the rock garden — without almost anything of value — is something that they’ve built up over years and years of collecting. It’s not really a garden, exactly, so much as a spot next to my granddad’s shed where they put all of their rocks for “the grandkids” to root through — but there’s other rocks scattered and hidden throughout the garden, too. Petrified wood, for instance — big, beautiful pieces that as an adult leave me wondering where they were taken from, if they were taken legally, but which as a kid made me jealous. Crystals, shellfish fossils, nothing of value, but things that were pretty or interesting.  

I rummage through the rock garden every Sunday. If I find anything I really like, I’m allowed to pocket it and take it home. Usually, they can tell me where it came from. If my granddad doesn’t remember, my grandma does. They exchange a look, and then it’s —  

“I think we got that one in Arizona” — at the rock and mineral show (and RV show, and swap-meet) they go to in Quartzsite every year, or — “That one we picked up in Idaho…”  

They can’t tell me what it is, beyond the very basic facts: what it is, where it came from. There’s nothing about the chemistry or the geology of it, only its history and connection with them: we picked it up here, we bought it off this guy… 

Everything tells a story, and they knew all of them.  

One of the best rocks in the collection was a coprolite. It looked exactly like what it was: a fossilized turd. A light brown in color, it was unmistakable.  

“Quartzsite,” said my grandma. “We got it at the rock show.”  

Granddad loved it. He laughed about it. When I found it and asked him about it, he grinned at me and told me: “Dinosaur poop!”  

I didn’t believe him until I went and looked it up in a book myself. Fossilized poop: the star of their collection, an insight into what they were like as people.  

I wanted it, but I knew better than to ask for it. Little pieces of petrified wood, certainly. Some of the crystals, sure — as long as I wasn’t greedy, if there were multiples, I could take what I wanted for my own collection, bothering my mom to write out little labels for each of them, because her handwriting was better than mine: this one came from this place, Granddad gave it to me on this date… 

I never asked about the poop. It was sacred.  

The Sunday visits stopped as I got older. We moved, and when we did, we switched schools. Suddenly, my mom’s parents were the ones that provided us with afterschool care. We’d walk from the elementary school four blocks away to their house, where my grandma would greet us and offer us a snack. Sometimes my granddad was there, and I’d help him work in the garden. We’d weed together in peace, not talking, before going back inside, where he’d peel an apple from the tree with a razor-thin paring knife, sharpened to the point where almost no blade was left, and give me pieces of it, sprinkled with salt. 

 
They still went to Quartzsite for the rock show (and swap-meet, and RV show) every winter, bringing home more weird rocks. I grew beyond interest in them, wanting to know more about the chemistry than the rocks themselves, but I admired their finds nonetheless.  

I knew I was the trusted one when, one of the winters they went to Quartzsite, I was asked to check in on their house. Water the plants, bring in the mail — all of it. I agreed, readily, and felt very grown-up about it.  

None of us knew it, but it was the last year they’d go. 

I grew up. I moved away for college, then grad school. Whenever I came home, I’d go to see them. I didn’t talk to them about the rock garden, and they didn’t share stories about Quartzsite with me. Failing health and increasing costs meant that they hadn’t been in years. There were no new rocks to share, no new stories about adventures out of state. Instead it was all about the garden, how friends of theirs were doing, what was happening in the neighborhood.  

My world grew, and theirs shrank.  

My grandma was the first to go. Dementia, first, though later we’d question if it was that, or if it had been a sign of what was actually wrong. Cancer, terminal, “out of nowhere” — though the signs had been there for years, if only we’d known to look for them.  

My granddad died two years later. Heart issues.  

I spoke at her funeral, what she’d meant to me. What it had been like to be loved by her; how I had been shaped as a person by both her and him, both of them.  

I didn’t speak at his. I couldn’t.  

After he died, the question was, of course, what do we do with the house? With seven kids, everyone had thoughts, ideas — what do we do, who gets what… There was money — an amount that shocked everyone but me. I’d been told, years ago, when I’d also been told that I wouldn’t inherit anything. “You got your inheritance,” my granddad said, handing me a check for my first semester’s tuition.  

I thanked him, and told him I understood.  

When dividing up the house, no one could decide how the contents were supposed to be divided. My mother, finally annoyed by the squabbling about who gets what, took matters into her own hands. She took post-its, numbered them 1-7, and stuck them on everything in the house before having her siblings draw lots. What number you drew was what you got, and if you swapped afterward, fine! It wasn’t her concern.  

The coprolite wasn’t one of the things that had a post-it attached to it. It didn’t need one. All of the rocks, I understood, had been dumped out in the “rock garden”, somebody else’s problem.  

They emptied the house, hired someone to remodel it, sold it — “to a nice family, they have kids.”  

I looked at the listing before it sold, did the “virtual tour” that Zillow offered. They didn’t include photos of the rock garden.  

How do we love people, and how do we honor their memory? I loved my grandparents. I miss them, as I say every time I mention them: that love, that connection, and the grief that never abates, ever-present, bearable but never gone.  

I don’t have tangible objects as an inheritance. I have stories, things that I remember, things that I was taught. The “dinosaur poop” on a shelf in the dining room. The rock garden with its treasures, being allowed to take one rock a week to build my own collection. The stories about “the island” and the cabin they had there, how my granddad had learned to garden from “the wisest man he ever knew”, who was also possibly the most contrary person he’d ever met. What I learned from other people, how he’d spent his time — how they’d known when he died, because he didn’t “make the rounds”. How to garden, how to cook, how to sew, how to can literally anything — all of it, valuable information.  

I get my love of reading from the two of them, my idea that learning is and can be lifelong. I’m shit at gardening, but I’m getting better.  

I’d like to think I get my magpie tendencies from them, too. The Pacific Northwest is a hotbed for agates and shellfish fossils. I collect both. Trips to the beach involve looking for “shiny rocks”, as my best friend puts it, my eyes trained on the ground to look for them. They’re in jars around the house, ready to go through the rock tumbler or get made (someday) into jewelry. 

I don’t have a coprolite. I’ve seen a few for sale. I’ve wondered about the provenance, where they come from, the legality of selling them. I haven’t been to Quartzsite. The closest I got was reading about it in Nomadland, wondering at the overlap: my childhood, the wonderland I’d been told it was, versus what was depicted on the page. Eventually, maybe, I’ll find my own dinosaur poop, but not yet.  

I like to think about who bought the house. “A nice family” — with kids, is my understanding, under the age of 10. The rock garden is still there. Will they know what they have? Will they see the petrified wood, the “dinosaur poop”? It’s pretty unmistakable, after all. No mistaking what it is – not a lot of rocks look so perfectly like turds.  

Will the rock garden inspire them? Has it already? What about the vegetable patch, the three(!) sheds and the specialized irrigation, the garlic patch that took care of itself, my grandmother’s irises? The interior of the house is so changed as to be unrecognizable, but the exterior, the yard, is the same.  

Do they love it? Will that place become as beloved to them as it was to me?  

I hope, if it hasn’t already, it will.