I put the phone down and made tea in Ana's chipped blue teapot, and I drank it standing at the kitchen window, looking out at the garden. The light was coming up over the fence, and the leaves were moving in the breeze, green and ordinary and full of whatever they had always been full of. I did not know yet what I thought. I only knew I wanted to find out, carefully, the way Ana would have wanted: with my eyes open and my feet on the ground.
Luis Herrera was waiting at the garden gate the next morning with a straw hat and a pair of gloves tucked into his belt. He was sixty-eight, wiry, with hands the color of turned earth, and he had tended Ana's garden since before I was born. He looked at the journal in my hand and nodded as if he had been expecting it.
"She kept that journal for thirty years," he said. "Every plant in this garden, she wrote it down. And those four —" he tapped the page, "— those four she circled every year, like she was afraid she would forget."
We started at the fence, where the tall, slender tree stood with its feathery leaves trembling in the breeze.
"Moringa," Luis said. "Your grandmother called it the drumstick tree. It grows fast, it asks for almost nothing, and it gives back more than any plant I know." He broke off a small cluster of leaves and held them out. They were tiny, bright green, almost delicate. "She dried these and ground them into powder. A spoonful in a smoothie, she said, for the blood. People have used it for generations — for blood sugar, for blood pressure, for the heart. It is full of good things, vitamins and those antioxidants everyone talks about now. Ana said it helped the body use insulin better, and kept the bad kind of stress down inside."
I took notes, the way I take notes at the clinic, in short lines. Interested, I told myself. Unconvinced, I told myself more firmly.
Luis moved on to the bush with the glossy leaves and the pale, round fruit.
"Guava," he said. "In my mother's house, and in Ana's, guava-leaf tea was as ordinary as water. You pick the young leaves, you dry them, you boil them, and you drink the tea after a meal." He smiled. "Ana said it was for after meals, for the blood. The old people believed it helped keep blood sugar steadier after eating, and helped with cholesterol, and with the swelling inside the body that makes everything worse. And for circulation — for the blood moving the way it should."
He picked a leaf and crushed it between his fingers, and the smell was green and sharp and clean.
"And here," he said, leading me to the neat row of low shrubs, "is the tea plant. Camellia, the proper name. The leaves of this one, you pick them young and dry them gently, and you get green tea. Ana drank one cup in the morning, sometimes two, never more. She said it was for the heart, and for the liver, for the fat that gathers where it should not. The researchers study this one a great deal, you know. It is one of the most studied plants in the world. It may help with the stress inside the body, and with circulation, and with keeping the heart and the blood pressure steadier."
I wrote that down too, and thought about the clinic, about the posters on the wall about diet and exercise, and about how many of my patients wanted a single answer, one thing, instead of the slow work of many things.
At the far end of the garden stood the papaya tree, its trunk straight and its broad leaves spread wide against the sky. Luis put his hand on the trunk the way you would greet an old friend.
"Papaya," he said. "Ana used the leaves, not just the fruit. She put the young leaves in soup, or made a tea from them. She said they were for the liver, and for strength, and for calming the inflammation that sits in the body like a low fire. When someone was run down, when a cold would not leave, she would make papaya-leaf soup and say it was for the body's defenses."
We stood there a while, Luis and I, with the journal open between us and the garden rustling around us. I looked at my notes: blood sugar, blood pressure, cholesterol, circulation, liver, inflammation, immunity. It was a long list for four plants. At the clinic, I had heard long lists before, usually from people selling something.
Luis seemed to read my face. "I am not a doctor, Maria," he said. "Neither was Ana. She never told anyone to throw their medicine away. She used to say the garden helps the body do its work, and the doctor helps the body when it cannot. Both, she said. Never one instead of the other."
That was the first thing he said that morning that I believed without reservation.