Returning to Lidice 

Before I knew how to run, how to swim, how to dress and tell the good from the bad, I learned how to take care of the gardens. Most girls and their Nivea-nurtured palms had nothing on my dirt-christened hands. 
I was christened all right. First, by the Catholic Church at the Cathedral of Saint Patrick, ten miles south of Lidice, where I grew up. Then I was christened by my grandfather's unforgiving gardens.
"You need to learn the value of hard work," he used to say to me. Of course, he knew a lot about hard work. Helvance was a small town near the Nazi-obliterated village of Lidice. The land was stained with blood. And my grandfather never made a difference between who was manly enough, adult enough, or tough enough to hear what he had seen. He was progressive like that, you could say. No discrimination in the department of permanent trauma. 
"We have to pass the story down. Otherwise, history will repeat itself," he used to say to me. As soon as I learned how to walk, I took care of the blood-soaked soil that would spur all the treasures necessary for a family to survive winters and enjoy summers. 
“You work, you reap the benefits,” he used to say to me. I think I hated him my whole childhood. 
The lesson of misfortune that happened on this soil was carved into me and forever stained my innocence. 
"Why don't we leave?" I would often ask him. 
"Because we know how to withstand a storm. It doesn't matter whether it's a storm of bullets or a storm of nature. We endure." I learned how to harvest pear trees. 

I learned a lot working in his garden. I admired his silent strength and his loud beliefs. I hated his burdens and his ancient personifications of youth. 
The pear trees were his favorite. So incredibly unresponsive to so many habitats, yet they subdued to his will and let him mold them into whatever he pleased.
He molded me, too. I became firm. Ready to withstand a storm of the world. 
“What if I choose to leave?” 
I was eighteen and eager to see the world, to study. 
He shrugged. He never acknowledged it as betrayal, but he didn't want to imagine that someone would leave the grove and grow beyond its borders. My grandmother encouraged me. 
“Go. You can always come back to your roots.” 
Of course, she would say that. She loved her roots. Spent forty-five years fertilizing them. But I didn't blame her. She was abandoned, and the land saved her life. Listened to her pain and accepted her tears without ever letting the salt infiltrate the fruit and spoil it beyond repair.
"The worldly possessions don't matter," he used to say to me. "It's only a matter of time before we're reduced to the state of a catastrophe like we were seventy years ago. Nothing will matter. Except for family and Mother Nature.” 
Was it a promise? A prophetic challenge? 
"You go and enjoy your life. But don't lose sight of what's important," he used to say to me. He packed three pears in my backpack. Reminded me that France and Belgium cultivated them but could never really nail the taste. He reminded me that the colonists brought pears to the American east coast, but the unique agricultural conditions killed the harvest. The pear trees thrived in Oregon and in Washington – North Pacific East. 
“If you want to go, you should go there. Always stay close to the land that can adapt.” 
Even when I thought I was making conscious decisions, his opinion was more important to me than my happiness. Because I wouldn't have survived without his tutelage. Without the values, he installed in me. I settled in Oregon. Portland was as close to my garden as I could imagine. I dedicated my life to literature and a small garden. 
Then, the worst possible thing happened. 
We were reduced to nothing. An imitation of life we used to have. For the first time in a long time, we united to survive. 
I wanted to go see him. Five years was a long time to be away. But I couldn't. I didn't go when I could, and now they canceled all flights. 
I waited. And I waited. Consoled myself with pears that never tasted the way they did when he served them to me.
Finally. Restrictions were lifted at least to some extent.
When I was waiting for a connecting flight from Atlanta to London, masked and miserable, I saw a bowl of pears on the front line of an airport restaurant. Of course, no one was eating in that restaurant. No one was eating the pears. I wish I could pull down the mask and ask the staff if I could have one. What a strange wish to bite into fruit at the airport. 
Who would ever in their ever-loving thought ask a waiter if they could have one of their decorative pears to go? 
No one. But that was before. Now, with empty halls and empty hopes, I would give anything to be able to tear the mask apart and have a pear. 
I was terrified and invigorated the whole flight to London. Stayed in quarantine for fourteen days, according to their regulations. 
“You have to hurry,” my grandmother told me on the phone. “He doesn’t have much time.” 
If I could erase the pandemic to be able to travel fast and tell him how right he was and that I'm taking back everything I ever said about living in the middle of nowhere, I would.
Now everyone lived in the middle of nowhere. Their houses and apartments were their nowhere. The streets were empty. Nowhere was suddenly everywhere. Nowhere engulfed us and suffocated us. 
 And the people capable of growing their own edibles were the true winners.
I survived. I arrived in Prague. Another fourteen days of quarantine. By the time they let me out, I sprinted to the nearest grocery store at the Hlavna Stanice, the Main Train Station, and bought the freshest, French-imported pears I could pick from the bunch. 
I boarded the train to Helvance, admiring the harvest I was bringing him. 
The train stopped at Lidice monotonously going into the station as my cell vibrated in sync with the screeching brakes. A text message from my grandmother.
“The garden is yours, now." 
He will never be able to say anything to me again.