A Victory Garden for Trying Times

by Debi Goodwin

  My work on a committee that was bringing Syrian refugee families to the region was the one activity I did to feel part of the community. But Peter, who never did anything halfway, had, for a time, been involved with the Rotary Club and its campaign against polio through his book on his own experiences. Throughout his cancer treatments, he was a volunteer on one committee trying to get a World Heritage designation for the region and another to create a park from lands that had been used by the Department of National Defence as a rifle range. That board wanted to preserve the last stand of Carolinian trees on the Great Lakes in a wooded area next to the range — trees that connected Niagara to vegetation farther south than most of Ontario could tolerate — as well as provide locals needed access to the lake. It also hoped at that time to see the different layers of the history of Niagara presented in the park with a small military museum and a healing garden to be created by a local Indigenous group in their fight against diets that had created so much diabetes in their people. Peter loved the idea of that park, and through his love of it, I could see his return to the calm he said he’d discovered watching that tree outside his window as a boy.

  As the light stretched longer on suddenly glorious May days, I moved through the garden, adding strawberry plants, cleaning flower beds, and trimming bushes. Now that I had my first rows of vegetables in, I felt more relaxed, and I worked in my old rhythm of doing whatever I saw needed doing. I wanted the whole garden to be beautiful that year; it had filled us with peace and awe in our first summer and I wanted it to nourish our souls that year, just as the vegetables I was growing would nourish our bodies.

  As I worked, I recognized something of my nature, of the distracted way I have moved through life. Friends often admire how much I get done, and I guess I do accomplish a lot. But I tend to lose focus, get easily bored, and switch to something else. And, that spring, I needed distraction more than ever.

  We had a date for Peter’s CT scan: May twenty-sixth. Then we’d have a week’s wait for the results. I welcomed the firmness of a specific date; I’d felt a little like an airplane in a holding pattern ever since Dr. F had said he didn’t know if he’d cut out all the cancer. Perhaps that is why the hovering birds had struck so much fear in me.

  In my own need to move forward, I had agreed to go on a press trip to Andalusia, Spain, for a travel article. The trip would just take six days in late June, and Peter encouraged me to get back to the kind of work I loved to do in my semi-retirement: writing about my impressions of new places and photographing them. And I would get to see Alhambra, the Moorish palace that I’d always thought of as mystical but had yet to visit. I also hoped to add a weekend to the trip to visit a friend of mine who was teaching in Casablanca. I’d only have to pay for the hour flight from southern Spain, but I didn’t want to commit to buying a ticket until I knew the results of the scan.

  Peter, too, sought distractions in his writing and program of reading. He finally got back to his blog. He called his first post since his surgery “Seeking the New Normal.” In it he described our trip to Pittsburgh, an evening we’d had in Toronto where he’d enjoyed appetizers at the Royal York’s Library Bar, and then one bowl of soup that showed how his experiences with eating had improved so much.

  A couple of nights ago I had a bowl of potato garlic soup, which was incredible. I loved the flavour, the texture, the taste. The fact that it was a small bowl was of little consequence. The wine I had with the soup was crisp, tart, cold, and a bit too expensive, but I am not complaining.… My surgeon says, I tell people [to] spend the first few years doing the things you most like doing. It is a plan.

  So, the new normal? Figuring out what a decent-sized meal really is. Finding wines I really like. Reading books that matter and appeal to me. Talking with and spending time with people I truly enjoy. Writing what matters to me. Travelling with Debi wherever we can and whenever we can. Being with and content in the moment. This is the new normal.

  While I gardened, Peter worked at finding his new normal. On his Facebook timeline, the new normal often involved food and quiet moments in the garden. “The new normal,” he posted one night, “is at times a jumble. This evening salmon, wine and the sound of a dozen species of birds … and solar lamps.” Another time he wrote, “So today in my new normal, I mowed the lawn, smashed two solar lamps in the process, while Debi worked on the front rock garden.… I destroy, she creates, but then again I get to sip wine and enjoy her work. The new normal is great.”

  Many of Peter’s Facebook followers responded with kindness and with thanks for reminding them to live in the moment. Others wanted more pictures of the garden or his recipe for the banana black walnut muffins he posted after he’d baked a batch.

  Before discovering he had cancer, Peter had got a permit to drive, the first step in getting his Ontario licence. When he’d come from Halifax to work at CBC in Toronto in 1989, he didn’t bother to change his licence, because he loved living in the city and walking about. He had never enjoyed driving, saw no reason for getting a car. He liked the idea of subways and trains. Over our years together, that had meant I’d been the only driver on our long driving trips in the States and Italy. And when I was ill, it meant I had to drive myself to the doctor, sometimes resenting the number of times I’d taken him to hospitals and doctors. Recognizing that I wanted a break from driving from time to time, he’d promised over the years to get his licence, but it wasn’t until we moved to Niagara-on-the-Lake that he’d begun the process.

  That spring, as he sought his new normal, he asked to go driving with me. He was a good driver, cautious but confident, and I enjoyed seeing the country roads around us from the passenger’s perspective for the first time in years. One day I had to have drops in my eyes for an examination, drops that made the sun too bright for my dilated pupils and made driving difficult. Peter drove me to the appointment and home again. “One down. Five hundred to go,” he said, referring to all the appointments I’d taken him to.

  And then he bought himself a small drone and practised flying it over the backyard. “OK, in today’s version of finding the new normal, I bought a drone,” he posted on Facebook along with an aerial shot of the garden. “So now I’m learning to drive a car, fly a drone and discover the new equilibrium all at the same time.”

  I watched him from the garden as he stood on the deck trying to control the drone’s flight from his iPad. Before he got the hang of it, I ducked whenever the drone flew too low and then crashed. One video Peter recorded has an image of me scowling mysteriously up at the sky.

  The week I got the first rows of vegetables in, I woke one night with a panic attack only a vegetable gardener can experience. An arugula panic attack. In other years, I’d planted the seeds for the peppery green as soon as the ground was soft or I had watched new plants emerge where seeds had naturally fallen. But I’d dug up my garden too early that spring to allow plants to take hold on their own and I hadn’t planted any arugula seeds yet. The next morning, I got up early and sowed the seeds I’d collected from plants in the fall, and later, when I took Peter to the nursing centre, I bought a packet of arugula seeds in a nearby store so I wouldn’t be without the possibility of planting more.

  Later that day, we drove to Niagara Falls, New York, to pick up a new wedge for Peter’s side of the bed. This one was available only in the United States and had a gentle incline that ended with a supporting layer for the torso. We hoped it would be easier on Peter’s back than the first Canadian wedge we’d bought. Luckily, Peter had established an American postal address with a service on the other side of the border so we could easily pick up mail and books on our trips to the States.

  Driving back toward Canada with the wedge in the trunk reminded me of a long-time familial connection to the region, one not related to orchards and gardens. For generations, my family had been going to Buffalo to shop for the day, just as so many people along the border did and still do when the dollar gap isn’t too wide. One of my strongest childhood memories i
s of travelling with my sister and parents on a shopping expedition. Each girl wore a set of old clothing over the border which we replaced with a new outfit purchased to wear back. But underneath our outfits we both wore girdles for my mother. As a teenager, my mother had suffered from polio, which had damaged her back muscles. Despite warnings from doctors that childbearing would put too much stress on her back, she’d had five pregnancies, with four live births. To support her weakening back muscles as she aged, she wore a stiff one-piece girdle/bra set unavailable in Canada. My parents were hard-working, honest people, except when it came to smuggling necessities across the border. Just as my mother’s need for those girdles cancelled out my parents’ moral qualms, Peter’s need for a wedge that might give his back some relief quashed mine.

  On the way home, we stopped at the shop of a local potter who also kept bees. As I paid him for a jar of honey, we talked about the cold spring and how it was holding back our gardens. I told him I didn’t know when I could get my tomatoes in and he gave me a tip: when the lilacs bloom, sensitive plants can go in the ground. This was a welcome bit of information for my collection of local lore. Earlier, I’d been told to prune the roses when the forsythia blooms. In the days of climate change, when the usual dates for planting are so unpredictable, tricks like these make a lot of sense.

  While I waited for any sighting of pea sprouts, I added more evergreens to the back garden: euonymus along a fence, boxwood and a thin, twisting cedar to replace the fat blue spruce. And I divided perennials to fill in holes in the front. With T, I dug triple mix into all the flower beds before covering them with hemlock mulch. Meanwhile, my seedlings were resting under the shade of our deck’s canopy before I allowed them to go into the sun, which was now strong and harsh. And I remembered how much I love May. So much happens in the garden in May. What I do in the garden in May sets the stage for the summer. It is the most hopeful of times.

  Chapter Ten

  THE WEATHER THAT SPRING switched so fast, we went from snow in the middle of May to a heat wave less than ten days later. While I welcomed the hot days, which meant summer would surely come and the ground would warm up to encourage all my seeds to sprout and reach for the light, it caught me off guard like so many events that year.

  It was a hot, rainless, and humid day when the landscapers finally came to plant the trees we’d ordered for the front garden. The tall Japanese maple, the magnolia tree, the dogwood, and the Black Dragon cryptomeria had all been waiting at the nursery. The cryptomeria, an evergreen with a dramatic bend, looked half-dead when it arrived and I feared the others would die before they got a chance to take hold. I learned that day that I take more care with the trees and plants I add to the garden than that landscaping crew did. While it was true that I could never have dug out the large blue spruce, which rested on a gas line, or lifted the heavy trees into place, I certainly would have done a better job of digging a large enough hole, soaking the hole with water, and then adding bone meal or triple mix to give each tree a fighting chance. Rushing at the end of the day, the crew did none of those things. They plopped the trees in dry holes on the hottest day of the year so far. For weeks after, as the heat wave continued, I had to run a hose on all the trees to keep them from going into shock. When I’d pointed at dry branches falling off the newly planted cryptomeria, the landscape boss said to give it a year, but I could tell within days it wasn’t going to make it, so I dug it up and took it back to the nursery. No one cares about a garden as much as the gardener.

  In the days before the scheduled CT scan, I fretted over the red maple, which was dropping leaves every day. While I worked to finish the planting in the rearranged front garden, I left the hose running slowing around the maple’s roots. The tree had been Peter’s pick and I didn’t want it to die. Despite the heat and dryness, I added purple day lilies, periwinkle, conical evergreens called Sky Pencil holly, Fothergilla with its bottle-brush flowers, and a corkscrew hazel called Corylus avellena, “Red Dragon,” to fill out the new beds. I liked the front garden so much more when I was done.

  Despite a back that ached from bending, I worked long days, digging, planting, and watering. In the hours of labour, nothing but the garden mattered — not the cancer, not my appearance or age, certainly not the time. I was often out in the garden until we had to leave for medical appointments — including Peter’s CT scan — or a Shaw Festival play we’d booked. I knew Peter would be my timekeeper, and sure enough he’d come out and say, “We have to go in half an hour.” He never sounded angry or impatient, although I knew he always liked to be early to appointments and events, while I was happy to cut the time as close as I could.

  When he called me in, I’d wash just enough to be presentable, and off we’d go with my mind still back in the dirt.

  By now, the lilacs were blooming and I couldn’t ignore the next stage of the Victory Garden. I planted each small tomato plant against a stake with a slow-releasing spike of fertilizer beside it. I sowed more lettuce, including the Drunken Woman variety that had been my first choice in the winter, and I filled in the remaining rows of root and leafy vegetables. At the back of the garden, the peas were finally pushing up sprouts with tendrils that stretched toward the netting. At the base of each supporting pole, I sowed Armenian cucumber seeds, hoping that despite the loss of my seedlings, I might still get a crop.

  When the larger garden bed was completely planted and watered, I stood back, admired it, and tried to imprint in my brain how empty it looked at that moment and how it would change. I knew that growth would come, just as I knew night follows day and day follows night. As the cycles of our daily lives reassure us all, the knowledge that seeds will grow into plants, that tiny tomato seedlings will produce round, delicious fruit, keeps me grounded every year.

  While working in the garden continued to bring me some relief during our wait for the results of Peter’s scan, it was the trees, always the trees, in our yard that gave Peter some peace. He could sit on our deck for hours staring at the wonderful old canopy at the back of our yard and then go to the front porch to admire the new ones we’d had planted. But he was exhausted from nights of poor sleep and worry. Before his operation in 2012, which had given him his new hip and equal-length legs, his entire body had throbbed with arthritic pain. Except for his back. He’d never had a complaint with his back. It had been a joy to see how much more relaxed his manner had become and how the lines of his face smoothed out when the pain disappeared after his orthopedic surgery. But now, despite the new wedge, he suffered from constant back pain, and I could see the lines tighten again around his eyes. He returned reluctantly to Tylenol, a medication he’d thought he’d said goodbye to.

  Even sitting on our deck, where he had usually been able to spend a happy afternoon reading, became painful. The iron chairs surrounding our table dug into a back that had lost fat and muscle mass over the year. I bought two wicker armchairs with thick orange cushions and a cushioned footstool that I thought would be more comfortable for him. They were the best purchase I’ve ever made. I had Peter back on the deck while I turned my attention to the smaller vegetable garden. When I photographed him smiling in one of the new chairs, he flashed me a V for Victory sign.

  In the smaller vegetable bed, shoots from my garlic plants stood six inches out of the ground. I tried to imagine what was happening underground. Were the roots stretching farther, the cloves widening to reshape into separate new cloves?

  Now that I could see where the garlic plants grew, I planted red-onion seeds in among them. Then, I broke open a cardboard container with dozens of thread-thin roots and planted leeks wherever I could. Next, I moved to the other end of the bed, mounded the dirt into piles, and planted zucchini and butternut squash seedlings into the top of each mound. I’d bought the seedlings from a local nursery after my own had failed. I was too impatient to sow the seeds directly into the soil and wait for them to grow into plants.

  About that time, Facebook sent me one of those “your memories from a yea
r ago” reports. It was a photo of a bunch of radishes that I’d posted, and now it was a reminder of how far behind this year’s garden was. But I didn’t let it get me down. There was nothing usual about this year, and at least now both of my vegetable beds were planted and Peter’s surgery was over.

  With the sudden heat wave, I had to make an immediate switch from planting to managing garden pests and blights. The heat brought out bugs I didn’t usually have to contend with until later in the season. Since one of the principles of my Victory Garden — and my entire garden — was to avoid chemical pesticides, I blasted shrubs and perennials that were invaded by aphids with water. And I squirted a recipe of canola oil, soap, and water on the black-eyed Susan and Shasta daisy plants that were covered in indeterminable brown spots. When I was watering the tomato plants, I noticed tiny brown spots on their leaves as well. I’d rotated the crops and grown my seedlings from disease-resistant seeds; there shouldn’t have been any signs of blight, especially this early in the season. Walking across the yard, I cursed. Why does it have to be so hard? Then I stopped and looked around at the beautiful garden beds, at the solid house we owned in the middle of a peaceful region, and I started to laugh at myself. Getting the right combination of water, nutrients, light, and insect control is difficult, yet most plants do thrive and produce. Growing plants is a lot like dealing with cancer: you try to take care of as many factors as you can, but intangibles like the environment and genetics are out of your hands. Yet people, like plants, do survive.

  Before our next appointment with Dr. F, Peter searched the internet for connections between back pain and lung cancer, but didn’t find any. “I want to know what is going on,” he said, “so I can start planning Rome.”