Lillian Heckler Portfolio

january 30, 2024

I grew up surrounded by the smell of wet dirt. I practically bathed in it. I would sit by my father in the bright, damp warmth of the greenhouses and dutifully scoop composted soil from a trough into trays of two-inch pots. He stacked them on a plastic card table and slowly worked through them, sprinkling seeds out of packets and pressing them down with his dirtied fingers. 

I remember my mother, her knees stained dark with soil, crouched over rows of vegetables in the field in front of the barn. She hacked at the clayey dirt, tugging carrots out of the ground by their green tufts and slicing lettuce free with a steak knife. It was a treat to watch her in the garden. The early summer sun would lap at my scalp like a dog, and I’d run down the rows, arms outstretched, pulling cherry tomatoes and sugar snap peas off of their plants and popping them greedily into my mouth. After a while, she’d come to gather me, a basket of vegetables on her arm. 

The rest of the afternoon would be spent in the kitchen, peering over her shoulder as she washed, chopped, and prepared the vegetables my father had planted months ago. She was the sous chef at a private French restaurant, a snotty one with a horribly conservative head chef and chickens that ran around inside the kitchen. Half of what my father ordered for the growing season revolved around my mother and the new recipes that she wanted to try, ones she stole from her boss and others that she concocted on her own.

I was always in awe of what she created, the sauces and salads and desserts that she developed with seemingly little effort. She inherently understood how to balance the various elements of a dish, a skill that most individuals went to culinary school to develop. Each elaborate meal came out better and more inventive than the last. But there was always one thing that I looked forward to the most, that my body instinctively craved at the beginning of the summer. 

Sliced thickly, slimy with olive oil, and garnished with flakey sea salt, I was obsessed with grilled zucchini. My mother would make it in large batches from the plants that sprouted endlessly in our backyard. She’d toss the slices in pepper, salt, and oil in a massive metal bowl, place piece after piece on the grill, and let them rest on the grates until they were charred.

While they cooked, she’d pull up a plastic lawn chair and sip a short glass of white wine while I kneeled in front of her on the brick patio, tearing weeds out from between the stones. After each slice finished cooking, she’d place it back in the metal bowl, and I’d swoop in to grab it before it had time to cool. I never needed utensils. I was perfectly content plucking the hot slices directly from the bowl and slurping them like a snake swallowing an egg whole. The best part was sucking my fingers of salt and oil after eating each piece.

In those moments, in the greenhouse with my father and by the grill with my mother, I was as much a plant as a girl, as closely related to a sizzling slice of zucchini as a human can get.