by Debi Goodwin
Near the end of April, when radish leaves should have been pushing through the soil, I still hadn’t planted their seeds or any seeds for lettuce or the early peas. Working on the tree and flower beds and waiting for the weather to warm had held me back. My Victory Garden was off to a very slow start.
But indoors, my tomato seedlings had their first true leaves and were getting larger each day. I had transplanted them into bigger pots and set them under the grow lights. I loved looking at them. All I had to do to imagine summer and the red fruit I’d pluck from the vines was wander down into the basement and marvel at the plants’ leaves, which were almost translucent under the florescent light. I’d run my hand over the small leaves, because I’d read that was a good way to familiarize them with the feel of the wind, and say, “Soon, tomatoes. Soon, we’ll all be outside and thriving.”
Chapter Nine
WHEN IT CAME TO VICTORIES, early May brought few on the gardening and healing fronts. The weather — fickle friend that it is — finally came through, first with one beautiful weekend for Mother’s Day. Jane came to visit from Toronto, and she immediately volunteered to help in the garden. But I didn’t want her to spend all weekend working. Hell, I didn’t want to spend all of the first beautiful spring weekend working.
On Saturday morning, Peter was content to take advantage of the warmth and sit outside on the deck to read and admire the garden, but Jane craved a walk in a woods. I suggested an intriguing trail I’d noticed off the Niagara Parkway. Jane and I followed a path through budding trees to a lookout over the Niagara gorge, the swirling turquoise water far below us — a wild, natural view marred only by the buildings of a resort across the way and a helicopter taking tourists on a ride over the whirlpool and nearby falls. When the helicopter disappeared, leaving a trailing buzz behind it, large birds — hawks or eagles, I didn’t know which — took its place high in the sky and then slowly circled downward. It was like being in the opening of a political thriller, with the distant buzzing a tension track and the hawks a cinematographer’s symbol of a shock to come. As more and more birds — at least six, maybe ten — dropped closer to us, I got spooked.
It didn’t take much to spook me that spring. Waiting for a date for Peter’s first postsurgery CT scan, waiting to get out in the garden, had left me fragile, easily pushed over the edge into a mush of primitive emotions.
Usually, I love birds. The ones that swooped through our wide, open backyard delighted us both. But these ones managed to vibrate old fears in me, like a finger pinging a tuning fork. When I was a girl, my mother had been so terrified of birds she’d scream whenever one got into our house down the old brick chimneys, which happened more often than you might think. My father would chase the frantic, flapping bird out with a broom while my sister and I both yelled at him not to hurt it. Years later, when I discovered Margaret Laurence’s A Bird in the House and learned of the superstition that a bird in the house was an omen of death, it seemed to echo my mother’s terror. And then I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds late one night as a teenager and, well, that didn’t help any.
In my practical way, I knew I’d be afraid of birds forever if I didn’t do something, so when I went to Europe for my year of study and visited London on my way to France, I purposely stood in Trafalgar Square, stretched out my arms, and let the pigeons, which were so plentiful in that square, land on me. I tensed at first, but eventually relaxed as I realized nothing terrible was going to happen. And I took that as a lesson: facing fears is always better than harbouring them. Still, out in the woods that day with my mind in constant anxiety over Peter, I realized those childhood memories still resided deep in my bones. And there was nothing practical I could do to eliminate my fears about Peter. The Victory Garden was as close as I could come.
I told Jane I wanted to move on, and we soon discovered another path that led to rough timber and earth steps down to a climb over rocks and finally to the bottom of the gorge. Fear and worry flew from me as they so often do when I walk in nature. We rested by the swirling waters and watched fishers cast their lines. My mind, now calm, returned to the necessities of my garden. I eyed rocks beside us that would look good at home. Ever since I’d left my vast collection of rocks behind in our Toronto garden, I’d found the beds at the new house rather barren before the plants came up. I picked through the rocks in the woods until I found one that had beautiful markings in green and red, one that wasn’t too heavy to carry. After I wrapped it in my sweatshirt to take home, Jane said I was crazy to haul it to the car but insisted on carrying it up the stairs.
That afternoon, with the rock placed in a new spot in the garden, Jane and I decided to do some work. I cleared branches, twigs, and leaves from the flower beds while Jane took on the task of picking up plugs from the lawn. Peter and I thought we’d been smart to have the lawn aerated, not realizing the machine the landscaper used would leave plugs of hard earth that looked like small cigars all over the grass. Jane became obsessed with getting them all up, moving across the lawn on her hands and knees while she listened to the newest Beyoncé album through earphones connected to her phone.
With the light fading, I had to keep calling her to stop and join Peter and me on the deck. I told her the remaining plugs would eventually break down in the rain, but on Sunday morning she went back out, criss-crossing the lawn.
I decided it was time to get the Victory Garden officially started. In the fall, I’d bought a kit for a net on sale to set up in the larger vegetable bed to support the peas and, after the last frost, the Armenian cucumbers. But when I opened the retaped box, I discovered key elements were missing, including the netting pictured on the front. I’d have to take the kit back and figure out some other arrangement. I took some iron posts the former owner had left behind and Jane held them while I stood on a ladder and pounded them into the ground; they would support the netting that I’d buy when I could. I didn’t want to plant the peas or the rows of greens in front of the peas until that netting was in place. Another delay.
A few days later, I did buy the netting, along with some raspberry bushes, sets of leeks for Peter, and some heirloom tomato plants at a local plant sale. It was too early for the leeks and tomatoes, but it felt good to plant the berry bushes, including a black raspberry bush I’d found, to finally get something in the ground. But when I started to set up the pea net, I realized I was short a pole to hold the full length up. Yet another delay.
The annoying holdup in getting the vegetables planted was nothing compared to the continuing frustration Peter felt over the surgical wound on his chest that still required a fresh dressing every few days. Each time I drove him to the nursing centre in St. Catharines where they took care of him, he came out looking dispirited. The different nurses he encountered tried to reassure him the incision was healing, though slowly because of his age and the effects of the radiation and chemo. But their reassurances did little. Peter wanted the wound healed and he wanted the scan over with. He wanted his life back.
In the meantime, while I waited for soil to warm and Peter waited for skin to knit, we turned our attention again to our trees. We got pruners in to clean up some of the older trees in our backyard and took the opportunity to get rid of an ugly old ornamental blue spruce that stood like a blob next to our deck, blocking the view of half our garden.
But by the middle of May I was eager to turn all my gardening attention to the Victory Garden. I wanted to get seeds into the ground, to start us moving into a new season of growth and abundance. The weather, however, had a different plan. The forecast for our region for May fifteenth called for flurries and freezing temperatures. On Twitter, someone from Burlington wrote, “Wanted: Mother Nature. Offence: Theft of Spring. If located, do not approach, lately been very unstable. Possibly running with Old Man Winter.”
Despite the cold, I had to get something done. The softly turned, unplanted vegetable beds felt like a recrimination. By this time the year before, I’d already had healthy young plants in neat rows and was picking
small greens for salads. So I had Peter come out and hold a pole that I’d discovered in the back of the shed while I pounded it into the ground. Then I tied the rest of the pea mesh to the last pole and wove four bamboo stakes through as crosspieces. Some drops of rain fell as I scooped out two trenches on each side of the mesh wall. But I didn’t let that stop me. I was determined to get something started. The planting directions on the packet were confusing, and in my haste to get the job done before I got too cold, I simply turned to my old method of using my gloved thumb to poke holes in the shallow trenches and place the peas approximately the right distance apart. They lay there round, hard, and inert, but I knew that with a little rain, a little sun, they would do what peas in the ground did and new plants would emerge. I slapped the earth over them with satisfaction. I had finally begun.
Meanwhile, inside the house, under the grow lights, my tomato seedlings were transforming into healthy plants with thick stems and strong secondary leaves. Beside the tomato plants, I’d set a few Redstart peppers, broccoli, rapini, and basil seedlings, which all looked promising, too. Those were all the surviving seedlings I had.
We’d gone away in late April on a road trip through northern New York State to Pittsburgh, a surprisingly vibrant city. The trip was the right thing to do. Earlier, at a visit to the surgeon, Peter had asked when he could travel. He was impatient to make up for lost time, to normalize his life again. And that trip to Pittsburgh gave him a feeling of freedom and sense of recovery.
On our first day we stopped at Letchworth State Park, an area of valleys and trees we’d always wanted to visit. We stood at a lookout and watched birds swoop across the gorge. When a park police officer came up beside us, he identified which birds were turkey vultures and which were eagles. Peter told the man he had a wonderful place to work. The officer answered that his job had its drawbacks and described being part of the search for a boy who had gone off the trail and fallen over the edge. We all stared at the steep slope to one side of us, where there was nothing to stop a fall. The officer had been part of the team that had walked through the waters of the Genesee River below to find the body so that a helicopter could airlift it. The death had occurred more than a year earlier but the officer still looked haunted. Perhaps he always would.
From the park we drove to the small town of East Aurora, where we’d booked a room at the refurbished Arts and Crafts building now known as the Roycroft Inn, a place we’d loved to stay at in our Toronto years. Peter was too tired to explore restaurant possibilities in the town, but he didn’t want to eat in the inn’s dining room either, as he felt he’d have to order a main dish with too much food for him. Instead, we went into the lounge. We were the only guests there and happily lingered over a meze platter and wine. In the way travel teaches us things, we learned a valuable lesson that night about managing food on the road that gave both of us the confidence to consider longer trips once Peter had a first clear scan. Just being happy together in that beautifully restored room strangely boosted our belief that the scan would be clean.
In Pittsburgh, Peter seemed his old self, even if we had to keep the days short so he could rest. He’d spent some of his early working years in Sydney, Nova Scotia, where his parents then lived. He had an affinity for steel towns, and loved seeing how Pittsburgh, like many steel towns in North America, had transformed itself, drawing visitors with its Andy Warhol Museum and its thriving restaurant scene. Zagat had recently named Pittsburgh the number one food city in America.
Peter had always wanted to write a book about grappa. When we’d been guests at two famous distilleries, Nonino and Poli in northern Italy, the owners had been impressed by his knowledge and enthused by the idea of a book that would share the feminist history of artisanal grappa. Peter was thrilled to discover he could get back into his research in Pittsburgh, giving him renewed interest in his project. Online, he’d discovered a bar there called Grapperia, which served grappa and grappa cocktails, and a distillery called Wigle that had once bottled its own grappa. He made appointments at each place and recorded interviews on his iPad. I was thrilled to watch him asking his intriguing questions, being recognized for his smarts and wit.
I was especially touched when he connected to the young man who had opened Grapperia a year earlier. Domenic Branduzzi had created the bar as a tribute to his Italian father, who had taught him to appreciate grappa. It was clear this man was still hurting from the loss of his father. Peter rarely told strangers he had cancer, but he did tell Domenic, who offered up his favourite grappa cocktails and sat with us at a table in his small bar long after the interview had ended.
Peter also seemed to get over his fear of going into restaurants at dinnertime while we were in Pittsburgh. From the bar, we went on to Piccolo Forno, Branduzzi’s family restaurant, where Peter ordered gnocchi (a favourite dish) and nothing else. And he ate it all.
The next night it was so warm in the city, we decided to eat outdoors at a restaurant Peter had read about. The late evening sun shone on us as our huge portions of food arrived. Peter could only manage half of his chicken dish, so we wrapped the other half up. We had a cooler in the car, and he ate the rest the next day for lunch at a roadside stop. These are the kind of details most people would quickly forget, but they were huge steps for us, successes on the way to victory.
In gardening terms, the trip came with a trade-off. I lost half of the seedlings I’d started before we’d left. I’d given my neighbour poor instructions on how to keep them moist, had told her a squirt of water each day would be enough out of fear she’d overwater. My Armenian cucumbers and all my squash seedlings were dried out stems when I got home. It was too late to start germinating another round inside; I’d have to grow the plants directly from seed in the garden, which would make for a later crop. As with anything that matters in life, you can’t take your eye off emerging seeds.
When I was getting up from my knees after planting the peas that cold day in May, a toad hopped by me and I cheered silently so I wouldn’t scare it off. We’d spotted their warty brown presence the year before and had, earlier in the spring, set out two toad houses to encourage them back into our yard. Unlike birds in houses, toads in gardens were good omens. They would eat insects, including mosquitoes — up to one hundred a day each — and in so doing, help keep our garden comfortable long into summer evenings. Despite shivers from the cold, a warm image flashed through my mind of Peter and me dining on the deck as the sun set late on a summer evening with the crickets as the only soundtrack.
The next day, I got out my map of the large vegetable bed and looked at how I could adjust it to group similar plants together while still honouring the principles of rotation. I started on the left side, setting up the teepees I’d created out of my father’s old iron tomato rods for the Kentucky Wonder beans I’d plant after the last frost. In between the teepees, where the bush beans would later go, I planted radish seeds, since they would produce their sharp-tasting roots quickly. In the next row, I planted the kale seeds I’d chosen, interspersed with more radish seeds. Just as I’d planned. As I moved across the garden, I stuck pretty much to the original map, although I ended up putting the beets all together.
As I worked, I sang the words, at least the ones I could remember, to “What a Wonderful World.” I had bookmarked it on my computer and, the evening before, I had watched Louis Armstrong sing it as a pep talk, just as I had many times during Peter’s treatment.
I skipped over the rows for the tomatoes; it would be weeks before I could set them in the ground without the fear of frost killing them. Before that, in any case, I had to harden the seedlings, bring them out on the deck to acclimatize to strong sun and cool breezes. In two days, the temperatures were supposed to rise, and I’d start to carry the trays out for a few hours at a time, leaving them first in the shade. Then slowly, I would give them more hours of direct sunlight each day. If I rushed that process, the sun would burn the virgin leaves. Once the plants were tough enough, I’d leave them out over
night.
As I packed up my garden tools for the morning, I eyed how much space I had left in the garden and where the rows of eating tomatoes, chard, carrots, and later beets would go. It was going to be a very good garden.
After lunch that day, Peter and I drove out of town to visit a woman we’d recently met. JA was a local champion of the Jamaican migrant workers in the region. Earlier that spring we’d gone to a concert she’d arranged to welcome the workers back for another season. A gospel choir from Toronto had got the crowd out of their seats, clapping and dancing in the aisles. JA lived in a rambling house that was part bed and breakfast and part home. But it was her garden that captivated me. The garden, with a back-to-the-land seventies feel, had chickens in an outdoor pen and several beds for vegetables, with rows of vibrant rhubarb all ready to be picked. Over rhubarb crumble, we talked about the situation of the migrant workers. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the program that brought Caribbean and, later, Mexican workers to Niagara for the growing season, and JA wanted Peter’s advice about telling their stories.
To my delight, Peter, the guy who loved big cities with all their bookstores, coffee shops, and energy, the guy who didn’t have any one place he considered his childhood home, had taken to our new community as much as I had. Because of his father’s work as a project manager on big construction jobs, Peter had lived in several provinces by the time he was fourteen and believed he could live anywhere. But the Niagara landscape seemed to resonate with him. On our many drives, we passed vineyards and orchards of peach and cherry trees and were both mesmerized by the sensation of row after row that seemed to be passing the car as we moved forward on the empty back roads. We crossed the deep swath of the Welland Canal and were rarely annoyed when we had to stop at a bridge to watch a towering ship appear to cross the road. And we remarked on the colours of the trees on the distant escarpment as they changed from the first yellow tips to a sea of green. It touched me to think Peter had finally found a true home, especially in a geographical area that so spoke to me.