GRANDMA LASHOCK'S RHUBARB CRUNCH RECIPE
“...the dessert she always made around her birthday, late spring (a Gemini sun: playful, quick-witted, easygoing).”
My grandma grew up on a farm, one of ten children. Those facts seem related—as if her parents needed all those kids to keep the farm running. But Grandma got into college, and went, for a while at least. (She dropped out to marry my grandpa, even though one of her sisters wrote him a letter asking him to stay away because Helen was so smart it’d be a shame if she didn’t finish.)
My aunt Carol once found a paper Grandma had written and commented on how strong the writing was. Grandma blushed and laughed, then reached for a cigarette. She was always laughing—not a big talker, but with that laugh, I never thought of her as quiet—and forever reaching for a cigarette. Even at the end, when she was in a coma, she kept bringing her hand to her lips, taking imaginary drags.
After she passed, we sat around telling stories. How, in the wake of three miscarriages after her firstborn, she’d sent money to missions asking them to pray for another baby—but forgot to tell them to stop and ended up with ten kids herself. The time she and Grandpa left my uncle, age 3, at a bar, got pulled over and the officer said, “How could you forget—” then noticed all the kids in back. How she loved to read and, as the Alzheimer’s progressed, would wander the house picking up a book, reading a page, then moving to the next room, the next book. Someone mentioned her rhubarb crunch. “We should’ve asked for the recipe before she died.”
“I did,” I said. I don’t remember how old I was. Eight? Nine? A child, enjoying my grandma’s baking. By that point she had at least a dozen grandkids. I might have asked for the recipe just to stand out, to get noticed. I have no other memories of having her full attention.
I worried that one of my aunts or uncles would want the actual recipe card. But they only wanted to be able to recreate the dessert she always made around her birthday, late spring (a Gemini sun: playful, quick-witted, easygoing). A way to use the rhubarb that grows wild in our backyards, while honoring my grandma, a woman who dropped out of college and made raising her family her life’s work.
Carol thinks maybe Grandma wanted to be a writer. We like to imagine she wrote in secret—scribbling poems and stories on the back of old bills, sneaking time for something she loved amid the chaos and demands of childrearing and homemaking. We remember how her left hip jutted out, making her walk a bit wobbly, the left hip being the one she’d carried all those babies and toddlers on. We like thinking of her in a role beyond wife, mother, grandmother.
Did my grandma feel like a number growing up? Did my grandpa make her feel seen, and special? How easy it is to feel lost in a big family—or literally forgotten, left behind. I don’t have any photos of me and Grandma, no other memories that don’t include cousins or aunts and uncles, but I have that moment when I asked her for her rhubarb crunch recipe, and she laughed her big wheezy laugh and wrote it down for me.
—Rachel León
Rachel León is a writer, editor and social worker whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature and The Rumpus. She's working on a novel.