Write for God

  
I stepped into our garden this afternoon and also stepped back in time. A heavy pot near one of the paths my husband and children made last summer was overflowing with leaves that took me back  about 45 years to the days when my grandmother, Abuela in Spanish, had an herbal remedy for every ailment known to man.

Lyme disease and Legionnaire’s disease would have been goners if Abuela had been given a chance to brew something on her stove to cure them.

How that pot and the leaves in it came to be is another story. Some time ago, my husband and I had been shopping in the garden section of a tool store. A small neglected plant called to us, since my green-thumb husband can bring anything back to life in his garden. On its own, that little plant has grown to take over the large pot and to spill over the sides.

The tag on the plant said it was peppermint, but there was something about the leaves that looked familiar to me. In smaller print, and misspelled, the tag also announced that this was yerba buena.

That was an herb I remembered from Abuela’s kitchen, where linden and chamomile–tilo and manzanilla–steeped in pots with yerba buena, depending on what ailed one of us. There was a remedy for “nerves,” another for headaches, another for upset stomachs and so on. I won’t go into how Abuela believed that colonics were the solution to a lot of ailments.

The tag on the scrawny plant we rescued at that garden area made me laugh. It reads, “used as tea to settle stomach upsets” followed by “excellent with roast beef.” I couldn’t decide if yerba buena was a seasoning for roast beef or if the tea for upset stomach could be taken with roast beef.  Mentha x piperita is the name printed on the tag, which means it’s a type of mint, but a quick internet search for that plant told me the label was wrong.

Seeing the overflowing plant in the pot this morning instantly took me back to my childhood watching Abuela work in the kitchen, where I am now ashamed to say that I probably got in the way of her work. I always had a lot of questions and constantly asked to help with shucking corn and peeling potatoes.

Sometimes she took me with her when she used our Communist Cuba ration books at the corner store to purchase whatever we were due that day. Each day’s meal was delicious because it came from the kitchen of a great cook who made everything with love.

This afternoon, I stripped some of the yerba buena leaves from one of the sprigs and brewed a hot tea. After removing the leaves, as I had watched my grandmother do so many times, I drank it slowly, savoring each memory of the days I spent learning about food and life from Abuela.