The Strawberry House: A Garden of Eden in An Industrial City

An urban homestead and the garden where my family history took root.

My grandparents’ homestead was a house not unlike this one. Photo by Dmytro Glazunov on Unsplash

This is an essay from my series: The Homes of My Life.

Every time I bite into the first ripe strawberry of the season, I remember my paternal grandparents’ garden. I see Dad, who planted that strawberry patch in his parents’ front yard when I was about 8, taking me there once every couple of weeks to check on the tender fruit. I hear him teaching me about the seeds buried in the flesh, showing me how the berries turn from green to white to red.

My paternal grandparents lived in the same city where I was born. In the 1980s Romania, it was common for one’s grandparents to live in a countryside homestead, surrounded by fields to work in and domestic animals. But mine were urbanites, living in an old neighborhood of our industrial city.

Every visit began the same way. Dad would ask me which route I preferred to take, either the main road or the street with the doll-house. I’d always pick the doll-house street, what a question. The house in question had an unusually low exterior window, as if made for little girls who passed by it, and in it stood a couple of dolls watching the world go by. My tall dad held my small hand in his forever warm fingers, while my excitement increased the closer we’d get to the dolls in the stranger’s window. Like a signpost, confirming we were on the right track on our way to Grandma’s house. We never found out who lived there, or what the story of the dolls was, but it had become as much a part of my visits as my grandparents’ house itself.

The neighborhood felt like a village tucked inside the city. My everyday life happened among concrete apartment blocks and large avenues, but the grandparents’ house seemed to be in another world. Just a half an hour’s walk from our home, the house stood at Music Street, no.1, where I half expected to hear violin practice drifting from open windows.

The garden was larger than the house. The home formed an L-shape on a corner lot, its two wings framing a plot of land where my grandparents planted tomatoes, other vegetables and the famed strawberries. That was the only patch of land I had access to in the middle of an industrial city. A quince tree, planted in the middle of the cultivated patches, gave huge fruit and a leafy shade.

My grandparents were beekeepers, so pastime was an adventure when I was there. The walls of the small garden were lined with a sample of bee hives; the rest were scattered around the county in acacia forests. I’d put on the special hat with the mesh over my face and pull out the frames, heavy with dripping honey, as grandpa had taught me. The bees will never sting you if you’re gentle, he would say. He proudly showed me how bees climbed over his hand, and nothing bad happened. The magic of childhood, the wiring of the brain in safety. I’ve never been afraid of bees ever since. I also enjoyed playing with the manual centrifuge in the workshop. I’d place the honey frames in it and use the crank to start the spinning, watching how the honey got expelled right off the frames. My dad, being the engineer he is, wasted no time in turning that fun time into a science lesson and explained the principle of the centrifugal force to me.

Although located in the same city, my grandparents’ modest homestead contrasted sharply with my godparents’ artsy apartment. They were almost the same generation, my grand- and god-parents, but they lived in two different worlds: the working-class simplicity versus a kind of urban bourgeois lifestyle.

When I reflect on where I come from, my grandma’s homestead feels like the real starting point. The deep end of the roots begins there.

It’s the foundation beneath the more polished childhood home where I actually grew up: an apartment in a mid-upscale part of the city, a couple of notches higher on the social ladder. But the home on Music Street no.1 feels like ground zero. Grandma, a fugitive from the Bessarabia region when the Soviets invaded it in 1940, restarted life in new lands. Together with grandpa, they created a modest home and a beekeeping business - my own Garden of Eden, with a quince tree in place of an apple.

Grandpa owned a motorbike, a Romanian brand called Mobra, and I think that was the utmost expression of his search for freedom. He tinkered with it constantly, cleaning it or repairing it right there on the alley between the house and the garden, next to the mint and strawberry bushes, and I have a feeling Grandma was not very happy about the mix. From what I remember, Grandpa was a joker, a storyteller with a peculiar humor.

Grandpa died in his eighties when I was in high school. Grandma lived another decade without him. She had perceptive, lively eyes that seemed to see more than you thought they would, and an excellent memory. When I was older and visited her during college breaks, she would tell me stories from the past with a hint of sorrow in her voice. The contrast between her slow physical movements due to her knee problems and her sharp mind always fascinated me. She was the same grandma I had known as a kid, just folded into an older, more immobile body. She always kissed my cheeks the same way, whether I was six, sixteen, or twenty-six. A fierce affection that unmasked a hint of constant longing, typical of grandmas who haven’t spent enough time with their grandkids. It always broke my heart a little; I knew I had never visited her often enough.

Even today, when I meet older women who are warm and loving, with a trace of suffering in their expressions, my subconscious recognizes my grandma in them. I am drawn to such women, to being in their company, to listening to their wisdom. An invisible thread magically pulls the past into the present.

The house on Music Street no.1 always smelled of food. The homestead was poor; but the kitchen was what really made this house a home. All sorts of soups and stews constantly simmering on the stove, and the roasted meat - Grandma’s favorite delicacy. Romania is big on pickling, so preserving vegetables filled much of her time. The basement cellar was full of large jars of pickled tomatoes, cabbage, cauliflower and even small watermelons.

Meat was scarce when my grandparents grew up, and even scarcer during the hardest years of communism, in the 80s. Having meat on the table often meant you had a connection to a butcher, someone to slip you a few extra pounds illegally. Later, having meat on the table became a symbol of status in Romania. Receiving guests at home without offering them a piece of meat was embarrassing for the host; you might as well just cancel the invitation. Having access to and eating meat was everyone’s fixation, a sort of survival instinct acquired in the past. Grandma always craved “a little piece of roasted meat” like kids crave candy. Her brain craved safety, survival. It was a remnant, I think, of periods of hunger she had known during her youth in the 1940s and 50s.

It was she who made me try eggplant spread, a typical summer dish I had disliked until spending a few days with them one summer break. I don’t remember how she persuaded me, but I suspect it had more to do with sitting beside her on a green wooden chair in the yard, feeling happy and entertained by the bees and the old-time stories, than with the food itself. But memory is tricky, so who can say?

Born and raised in the city, with both sets of grandparents also living in urban areas, my only taste of country life was my grandmother’s garden. Like a sample slice of Iberian ham, paper-thin yet rich enough to suggest an entire feast, the hours spent in that garden were my tiny, delicious sample platter of rural living.

I haven’t seen the Strawberry House in about 20 years.

Other people live there now, after Grandma’s passing. It’s not my home anymore, although the structure stands. New memories are forged there by new people, different jars of pickles now fill the cellar; someone else is making the roasted eggplant mousse. But the version of the house I knew remains an outpost of my family story, an additional space of safety, where I learned about kindness, bees, and strawberries.

---

I’m Monica, and I navigate life as a multi-country expat, surrounded by books and writing. My mind is modeled by the 5 languages I speak (almost) daily.

Millennial Monica is my newsletter about what it’s like to live a multicultural life and not lose your Self along the way. Interested in reading more of my work?