From the nursing home where she was happy to be stuck the last years of her life, my grandmother, never a great lover of nature, surprised my mother by asking for mountain laurel. That some things persist from the Great Depression to the new millennium, through so much deforestation and so much garbage, can be called a miracle or another face of invasion. Nothing is balanced, we are taught to anticipate. Antarctica is cracking, though it is cold in Texas. The earth is laying down graves and water so quickly you can see it at low shutter speeds. Nothing will reset until we are gone. And even then, it will not be as it was when we cherished it.

Kalmia latifolia, the best-known of the laurels, is so native to North America that scientists believe Henry Hudson referred to it in his journals in 1609, and the Swedish botanist Peter Kalm first catalogued it in 1748. It is the species my grandmother remembered from her childhood and kept in a hospital cup by her bed her last summer. Its Latin base recalls the man who first described it in scientific detail, along with 380 other species of plants unknown in Sweden. Looking for new sources of food, fodder, silk, and dye that might survive in the Swedish climate, he travelled from New Jersey to southern Canada. Mountain laurel was, of all the species he described, the one his mentor, the famous taxonomist Carl Linnaeus, chose to name after him. Perhaps it was the plant Kalm mentioned most frequently, or perhaps it was described with the most fascination. We know, from Kalm’s journals, that he knew that the plant was poisonous, but that he ascribed to it both existing economic value and potential value as an ornamental plant in Europe. Perhaps he felt the poignancy of deadliness in something so beautiful. We now know that laurel can reproduce with little insect pollination, and has evolved to manage without it, sending powder and sticky threads of pollen grains out from its towering blossoms to others of its kind. For all this independence, it has coevolved with a fungus that lives on its roots and catalyzes its absorption of moisture and nutrients. In some varieties the ability to make food independently has been lost, so that it at once exceeds the normal power of plants, and also perhaps lacks the central quality we expect plants to have.

The Estell Manor Park covers a protected area on the edge of the Pinelands where the ruins of a nineteenth-century glassworks and a WWI bomb factory have been reclaimed by the Pines. A series of trails were completed in 1984, the year before my parents moved my brother and I back to New Jersey from Saudi Arabia, when I was two. Not only can you spot birds of prey there, which would be reason enough for my parents to go, but shortly after our arrival, the Park Service added a small taxidermy museum that was terrible to me when it opened, with a black bear standing on its hind legs, about as tall as I am now, and a wall with twenty renderings of significant scat. I didn’t think as a child that the sadness of dead animals could be surpassed, but I know now that I saw them in their heyday. Human cleverness can insert something stout at the center, but it cannot forever foil time’s plot to part glass eyes from feathers and fur; even at its best, it never quite passes for life. And though the garden, begun before gardens became fashionable (again), is a stringy tangle even in June, there is a room at the back of the building where they keep box turtles in murky tanks, who even I believe are not unhappy. Someone respects them; we know this because we once saw one turtle with two uneaten raspberries on its rock. It could have been a sign of depression, but my father and I took it to signify a superfluity of raspberries. Stuck together in one of our painful, incomeless summers, I remember my dad saying, “I wish I could have some raspberries.” We did not waste money on things like that. I still find it hard to.

My grandmother grew up on her mother’s chicken farm in south Jersey with three sisters and a brother. The first child, born in Italy, had died as an infant and the youngest daughter was named Salvadora after her. My grandmother was the oldest surviving girl, the first child born in the United States. She never knew what her name really was: her mother was illiterate and spelled it Angelo on her original birth certificate, Angelina on a replacement, and, in a lifetime of speaking only when necessary, never gave any sign of a more specific intention. My grandmother would spell it Angela on two marriage licenses, but the sense of the name’s arbitrariness stayed with her. Like her mother, she seemed to believe it mattered little if at all.

Like many immigrants, my grandmother’s father, Antonio, missed the homeland, which in his case was Sicily, a place as isolated and unique as it is possible to find in Western Europe. He convinced his wife, Elizabeta, a hard Neapolitan, to return to Italy. There, in the country they had left behind, she was able to compare her native southern Italy with south Jersey. Her decision was swift: she told her husband she was going back to America with or without him. Visiting Sicily and Naples in 2014, almost a hundred years after their second departure, I could still see how a person from Sicily would find any other place hard to learn, and I could see even more easily how a practical woman who had lived in New Jersey could fail to tolerate the madness of southern Italy. Antonio died a few years after his return to the United States, when my grandmother was seven years old. The Great Depression began when she was twelve. On the chicken farm she learned, on the special occasions it was served, to clean a chicken bone better than a team of maggots and to take the work all food entailed seriously. A lifetime after this childhood, pleasure for her was a sausage biscuit at McDonald’s and a long, hot day at Disney World. Gnocchi and eggplant parmesan were a task not to be resented, but neither to be disentangled from either the world in which she grew up or the fifty years of running and owning restaurants that followed.

I was not patient with her unpractical, symbolic impulses for thrift.

Time has cast them differently to me, so that I think if I could see them again, I would smile, but I won’t see them again. She used to add a little of the execrable wine she liked to buy to distilled white vinegar to make it look like red wine vinegar, for an approximate savings of five or six cents over store-brand wine vinegar. She liked to buy a gallon of milk, divide it into empty Folgers instant coffee jars, and freeze them to use one at a time. Savings, maybe twenty cents? When three different cereals were running low (and depending on her mood, they didn’t have to be very low at all), she would combine them into one confusing, unappetizing cereal. No savings there, but martyrdom, and Italians easily confuse that with virtue.

When Henry Hudson was exploring North America, it was the explorer’s prerogative to refer to the flora and fauna by any term that suited his imagination, and in these phrases we can see a mixture of fascination with the new world and nostalgia for the world sitting at an ocean’s distance in the past. Naturalists reading his logs have speculated that what he described as “rose trees” on his 1609 landing on Cape Cod may have in fact been the mountain laurel, which is native to almost all of North America, and whose relatives—rhododendrons, azaleas, blueberries, and cranberries—all grew in the swamps and Pinelands of New Jersey, where my grandmother and I lived as children, fifty years apart, seeing many of the same plants. To the extent that we can plausibly attach this phrase of Hudson’s to the laurel, we notice in it the height of the plant: how often is a shrub taken for a tree? And of course there’s the richness of the blooms, so unusual in nature, which tends to be so careful, almost private, with its angiosperms, which are meant, anyway, to be eaten, so that flowers are relatively rare in nature. Large, luscious flowers usually require human ingenuity to persist. It is true that roses and laurels look little alike to anyone interested in plants, but their abundance of flower is similar, and unusual, and to a person like Hudson, whose gifts and training were in being intrepid rather than knowing what plant species look like, a resemblance between the two is understandable. It’s hard to remember how much new things look alike to people unused to contemplating them. In the association, too, there is a suggestion of the plant’s ubiquity—it was then so common that it’s likely Hudson ran into it without trying. Mountain laurel still thrives in the remaining woods in New Jersey and can startle anyone with its thickness and abundance, the delicate and robust beauty of something so indifferent to cultivation. We don’t expect the woods to teem with flowers; a few pines are permitted to grow there, and the forest floor is supposed to be full of needles. Branches shelter brown birds, and the snakes are all gray or black. It takes effort to believe the woods can dazzle.

Every funeral I’ve been to in recent memory has been at the Veterans’ Cemetery in the Estell Manor Park. My mother’s father was buried there; then her stepfather, who we called Pooh; then my brother’s father-in-law; and finally my grandmother, next to Pooh, but not that far from her first husband, either. It is surely a convenient place from which to cast his bitterness towards them in the afterlife, in the event there isn’t television. Soon, I imagine his second wife will die, and I will go back to listen to taps underneath the arbor; endure three or four ad-libbed evangelical sermons; and watch an elaborate coffin, a symbol meant to testify human love, be lowered into a hole bordered in sheets of plastic grass. It is a kindness that the government offers these services free to people who served in the army and their spouses, who, at least in my family, always die destitute and in need of help to restore the dignity of who they were when they risked their lives in the Pacific. Listening to some beautiful young man play the bugle, those heartrending notes from some distant time when they really understood the quotidian tragedy of death, makes you feel like the person slipping into the ground was not the complete disaster you knew them to be a few weeks earlier, when their death seemed like it would be (and it would be) a mercy. You imagine them strong again, able to survive things, to carry others on their backs. You saw their wives holding the country together, growing victory gardens, bearing children without fuss. You feel like you’re remembering their beauty, although you’re just imagining it: no photographs persist from back then.

In this park practically everything of note that happened outside in my childhood happened. Here, my father and I took nature walks that ended in the taxidermy exhibit and the turtle porch. Here, my mother took my friends and me on picnics at the only public playground in driving distance. Here, I learned to fish on the floating dock as well as you can learn when you never catch anything. Here, my mother and I went to collect mountain laurel when my grandmother asked for it, and it sat, collected in a Styrofoam cup, among the collection of ceramic figurines on her nightstand, the only piece of furniture she had. The laurel in Estell Manor grows so thick that you can drive a car under where the branches from either side of the road, sagging with blooms, almost meet overhead.

My parents brought my grandmother and my mother’s stepfather, Pooh, to New Jersey from Florida long after they had ceased being fit to live independently. The crisis that forced their hand was not Pooh’s worsening Alzheimer’s, but when my grandmother broke her hip for a second time, not a clean break but smashed in such a way that the doctors advised against operating until it was as healed as it could get on its own. To say that she never walked well after that seems beside the point; she never had a life like it had been before in any respect, and, as far as I could tell, she did not resent this.

The period in which my grandparents lived in an apartment in Aloe Village, a low-cost senior development half a mile from my parents’ house, was brief and painful. Pooh, eager to get back to Florida, spent most of his time trying to get into his car, to which he had been given the wrong key. This, too, is familiar to many families: the problem of keeping a dangerous relative off the road, and the ongoing anger, violence, and depression the semi-daily discovery of the situation inspires in them. Pooh, three hundred pounds in his prime, was no longer so large, but he was still someone it was hard to get up once down. When he went to the hospital a third time for swollen ankles and brought a nurse with him to the ground, it was determined that he needed to be in a nursing home. At the nursing home, he was belligerent whenever my grandmother was absent.

She went into the nursing home, ostensibly, to calm Pooh down. Within six months he was dead, and she stayed on. One explanation for this centers on the bureaucracy by which the old are divested of their assets so they may receive government assistance for the health care they can no longer afford to refuse. It is true that the cost of her stay in the home up until Pooh’s death justified her living there while she applied for Medicaid, on the premise that it was medically necessary. Still, the fact remains that she didn’t want to leave.

The town of Swedesboro, in southern New Jersey, was called Raccoon in the days when Peter Kalm used it as the home base of his exploration of North America. The primary impetus for the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to send him to the New World had been to collect the red mulberry, which they hoped could be grown for silk in Finland, but the mulberry does not seem to be what Kalm found most compelling in his travels, and is not what he is remembered for. He went as far west as Niagara Falls, of which he furnished the first scientific description, and as far north as Quebec, experiencing the interior of the vast Canadian periphery Hudson navigated by sea on his two voyages. Kalm became friends with Benjamin Franklin and the naturalist John Bartram, and even met a widow in south Jersey who he would go on to marry. Everything we know about his time in the New World suggests a person who took his time, who looked closely at things, who took cuttings of plants to discern the details that distinguish one species from another, one variety from all the others. Where Henry Hudson’s story speaks to the powerful inner drive of a man of single-minded pursuits, Kalm’s footprints lead in many directions, and his notebooks burst with exactness. When each looked at the horizon, Kalm saw trees that lived nowhere else in the known world; Hudson saw Asia.

My grandmother and I grew up so differently, and lived during such different times, that it is hard for me to really understand how she felt about anything, let alone how it was possible to not see the nursing home as confinement. Perhaps she simply loved being waited on to the small degree she was waited on, after a lifetime almost exclusively characterized by work: from raising chickens as a child and selling eggs every weekend; to quitting high school to work in a bomb factory; to cooking breakfast, lunch, and dinner for customers seven days a week until she was in her sixties; to frying donuts at a resort for fifteen years after she and Pooh retired; to her last job of making coffee in the 7-11 from four to seven-thirty in the morning, five days a week, until she broke her hip the second time. Perhaps it was a relief to eat food that bad, to have no one around looking to her for quality control or instruction, or questioning whether she had complied with some tradition, like smelts on Christmas or black-eyed peas on New Year’s. But not only did she stay in the home, she refused to relocate from the Alzheimer’s floor, where she was the only patient with her mental faculties intact, and intact they were: she was sharp until she died, a voracious reader of smut, with an enviable memory. And perhaps the fact that she alone in such a place had her wits is the key—she became the darling of the floor, the person all the nurses liked best, the only one they could talk to, special, privileged, and beloved.

She was not the kind of person to be troubled, as I was, by the line of patients brought before the front desk each morning to drool until lunch; or the double-amputee with Down syndrome; or the pretty woman in her thirties whose parents visited her every day wearing their crushing, powerless sadness; or the ancient woman who caressed a baby doll endlessly like it would die if she stopped. My grandmother was seasoned at not noticing human tragedy. She would take breaks from this floor, sometimes to have dinner with the patients who could talk, mostly to play bingo and amass a collection of ceramic knickknacks truly aesthetically painful to my mother and me, but she would always return quickly to her floor, happy to be back. This woman who had always been cold, who found it difficult to smile, who never hugged or kissed her daughter, who was worshipped by husbands who found serious challenges to intimacy rewarding, and for whom life had always been about work, got the opportunity, in the last years of her life, to be a different person, a sweetheart. Though I believe she loved to see us, when we visited her it was always as though we were interrupting something, as it can feel when you spend time with two people who have just fallen in love. I used to watch the bewilderment on my mother’s face as the nurses described how they doted on Angie. It must have been hard for my grandmother to have these witnesses of her past show up with their confused expressions and their overly awkward ways. When we took her to our house, we could all relax a bit better.

The nights when we brought my grandmother to our house for dinner were painful and laborious because of her difficulty walking, but they were also strangely joyful. Not that any of us had much to say to one another; conversation was not something we excelled in together. But there was some particular, exact excitement about the food we would eat. There was a strain of blood running through the three of us, that, for all it did not help us understand each other, gave us the same taste in food. We loved strong flavors, especially Italian flavors of the kind favored in south Jersey in the fifties. Most of all we liked hot peppers cooked in olive oil with garlic salt. We also liked bitter greens, raw onions, wine, and just enough bread or pasta to keep revolt out of our gut. My mother and I planned dinners whose organizing principle was food nobody else liked. We made great salads of arugula, radicchio, radishes, and raw hot peppers; pasta with broccoli rabe and anchovies; roasted red peppers and bleu cheese; and whatever unusual thing we found at the produce store. My grandmother looked on these meals we made in fascination, as if she was recalling a vein of her own personality no longer important in her day-to-day life. She liked to eat things as they were: a radish, a hot pepper, a turnip. She couldn’t eat much of the things she liked best, having had half her colon out and suffering from the weak appetite that precedes death, but there was some evidence of a past that predated me and perhaps even my mother in these foods she recognized. Raw radishes and hot peppers made her remember things about herself that she had in common with the two people who, secretly, painfully, she loved.

She wasn’t a woman to walk in the woods for the love of it. She didn’t have to be forced to quit school, to run away from her husband and children, or to make coffee at four am at the age of eighty for minimum wage. She did things because they were her idea of life. Still, she lived stoically in the same magical world others have made an art of describing, and to say she never noticed it would be to ignore evidence. Usually, she wanted my mother to bring candy to her in the nursing home so she could give it to the nurses with whom she was deeply involved in her new, last romance. Then one day she asked for mountain laurel, as if she had once been a little girl in the forest of south Jersey, noticing how things we have no hand in, no control over, can be magnificent, and hadn’t forgotten it. The part of Mays Landing in which she grew up, though to this day not large enough for a post office, is called Laureldale.

In the end she would die of an infection, and the trajectory of her death still defies my understanding. As if it had happened overnight, one evening I saw her foot unwrapped, and the heel was eaten to the bone. For a few weeks she suffered through the changes of dressing and trips to the hospital that were all the ideas her nurses could conjure to treat her, until she became as insensible of the world as any of the other patients on the second floor of the nursing home, and died. Her life did not have the elegant shape of a bronze sculpture, and I have to guess almost as much about her as I do Henry Hudson or Peter Kalm, though so often she sat in front of me and we both tried to speak.

That it has always been assumed that Henry Hudson, his son, and the crew members loyal to them died when they were set adrift in the Hudson Bay, in a shallop, by the mutinous crew in 1611 reflects a failure of the seventeenth-century European imagination to contemplate living in North America. Why should his abandonment in the New World have meant death? The Bay was so rich with fish they had survived a winter there, and this was spring; the Native Americans had been willing, according to the log, to trade with them only months before. If he went on land and hunted, settled, traded, married, acquired an unknown disease, spread unknown diseases, professed a new religion, or had done any other number of things, no one in Europe would have found out about it, and it does not suit the heart to call the time of death when the telephone line of history goes silent. We know there is a life to everything that can’t tell us about itself, or craft an eloquent apology for its existence, or argue that it should be believed in. It is our error to magnify our drama because of its casting in words, to ignore what we can’t read about, or which simply isn’t screaming for our attention. Lives end when people set out on boats alone and drift away from language. We write to try to change this, but with their departure they inherit a privacy that can never be violated. Desperate for a word, we call it vanishing.

My grandmother communicated easily only with children, and when I was a child she taught me to make gnocchi. That afternoon was one of the most carefree of my life—flour atomizing in the sunlight, potato flesh stuck to the backsplash trimmed with geese in blue ribbons. With Days of our Lives on the tiny television mounted in the far corner of the kitchen for noise and the occasional gasp of distant, uncreditable drama, we made a couple hundred gnocchi, time passing in the effortless way it always seems like it must have passed very long ago before anyone knew about the things that trouble us now. Many years later I asked her to teach me to make homemade spaghetti, and by then the experience was unrecognizable. She was all skill and seriousness, chilling in her competence. For all that she made it look easy, I took away the impression of hardness.

Every other week or so, I often feel as if I have to invent how to do what my grandmother taught me when I was nine. Remembering nothing pertinent about the process, nevertheless I find myself at the store sticking two potatoes into my cart to make gnocchi, once again, for no good reason. The results sometimes splendid, sometimes awful, I know that I don’t really know how to do it in a way that qualifies as skill, but I keep feeling that I want to, that something very good will come of it, that something gone will come back. Noodles, however, I have approached with caution and gravity. The pasta roller held in the fastness of my highest cabinet, I often tell myself it is broken.

Last night I took it down, the mountain laurel that does not grow in west Texas spreading through me like a web of very unusual fungus keeping me alive. I put the flour on the counter and a well of water at its center. I mixed and kneaded in the silence of early Saturday evening, thinking, I can learn this, hearing—as if there were more than one person in me—I have to learn this to teach my child. Turning the handle the tip has come off of, I heard something rattle inside it, but knew it could not be called broken. The dough, as if made by someone else, turned to ribbons of maidenhair in my hands. My whole life I have hungered for this kind of food, that persists intact from a long time ago, that interferes with nothing, that you can love without thinking.