by Debi Goodwin
A true gardener, especially a Victory Gardener, would never leave the field in the middle of the battle, but I did my best to prepare the beds for ten days without me. I pulled up the small but delicious radishes, weeded the rows, thinned the beets and carrots, sprayed other plants with my natural insecticide concoction, and showed Peter how to use the various hoses that circled our garden.
Before I left, we had birthdays to celebrate. For Peter’s sixty-third birthday on June 12, he and I drove to the nearby village of Jordan and had lunch in a favourite inn that overlooked the deep valley, now green with summer. The restaurant had a take on fish and chips with local perch that appealed to Peter. He ate all his fish and, with my enthusiastic help, all his fries, and we even ordered a dessert to share.
Back home, Peter posted two pictures from our lunch on Facebook: one of our lemon chiffon dessert with fruit and cream before we’d demolished it, and one of an empty plate along with these words: “The new normal birthday edition. I alone could not eat this, but with the assistance of the dearest person alive, Debi Goodwin, the dessert was done and it was delicious.”
Two days later, on the fourteenth, we drove to Toronto to celebrate Jane’s thirtieth birthday with family at an upscale Italian restaurant. There, Peter managed to eat a main course of lamb and had enough energy to enjoy the evening. When I left for my trip days after that, I felt okay about going. We are on our way, I thought. Peter is recovering.
Chapter Eleven
IT WAS ONLY DURING MY TRIP to Spain that my body and mind recognized how slammed they’d been by the past seven months. The effect started the day I left. I spent so much time getting the garden in shape that I ended up leaving Niagara-on-the-Lake later than planned and worried my way through heavy traffic. Cursing myself. Feeling like a fool. At Terminal 3, which I seldom used, I found the automated check-in rushed and confusing. As I lined up to put my suitcase through an X-ray machine, an airline representative came up to me with my passport. I had left it in the machine reader. I suddenly felt old, incompetent, and, although I had always been a traveller and an expert at getting through airports and keeping my belongings safe, a travel newbie. In the wide space beside the gates, there were rows and rows of tables where relaxed people ordered food from iPads. I sat at a table and drank from a bottle of water I’d bought and felt like weeping. It had been a rough winter and this was the first time I’d sat down without anything needing to be done or without anything to distract me. There were no weeds to pull, no insects to blast off plants.
The press trip itself was delightful. S, from the Spanish consulate in Toronto, had organized an intensive itinerary through Andalusia. Each day was jam-packed, with little time left for anything but sleep and a quick nightly look at my photographs and notes of the day’s excursions. We were wined and dined on all the best the region had to offer; shepherded through a tourist-filled Alhambra and sleepy medieval towns in blistering summer weather. The group was small, just five Canadian writers travelling with S and a local guide. A friendly group, but I kept to myself a lot, lost in thought about Peter, still worried despite the last scan.
One day my ankles swelled up and that night I woke up with chest pains. I was convinced, after an internet search, that I had congestive heart failure and someone would find me dead in my bed. I had managed to keep such irrational fears at bay when I was taking care of Peter, getting him to appointments and trying to boost his spirits. Alone, my fear demons took over. In the morning, I discovered my ankles had been swollen from the straps on my sandals that had been pulled too tight and my chest pains were the first sign of a cold. I would most certainly live.
At the end of the six days I wished I was going back home with the others. I was sick and woke up to learn that Great Britain had voted to leave the European Union, unsettling news in trying times. I wanted to get back to my touchstones: Peter and my garden. But I continued to my weekend in Casablanca, which unfortunately involved an extra day to make the right flight connections.
The city was in the middle of Ramadan and many of the restaurants were shut for the month, the Grand Mosque closed to non-Muslims. Still, with my friend as my guide, I enjoyed walking the city and bargaining at the local souk where the shopkeepers were, to my delight, easygoing, perhaps out of exhaustion. During the long nights, a steady flow of cars sped below the open windows of my friend’s apartment. As I imagined those occupants revelling between their two meals of Ramadan, I felt a deep homesickness that I hadn’t experienced since I’d gone to France on my own as a twenty-year-old student, a wrenching fear that I would have years ahead of feeling alone and disoriented.
Over the ten days I was away, Peter and I communicated through email. In our efforts to be kind to each other, I suspect, he played down his pain and, I discovered only later, his new problems with eating, and I downplayed the gourmet food I was sampling and the amazing sites of Moorish culture in Spain that he was missing. Peter wrote of thirty-degree days and no rain and reassured me he was watering. He wrote of good sleeps and bad sleeps, walks to the post office, a successful speech in support of the local library, and eating the first ripe patio tomato. Our neighbour had driven Peter to Hamilton one day for an appointment with Dr. F, and Peter wrote that the incision was finally healing and Dr. F was pleased with his progress. At that meeting, Peter noticed Dr. F seemed down and asked him how he was doing. I suspect Dr. F was unused to patients inquiring after him. Dr. F told Peter that there were days when he had to tell too many patients there wasn’t anything he could do for them, and that day had been one of them.
When I got home the whole region looked parched. We were in the midst of the longest drought in thirty years. The lawn at the community centre was completely brown. Around town, it was easy to tell which owners watered; their green lawns stood out like small oases in a desert. Our lawn was somewhere in between the extremes, but we decided to water to make sure it looked fresh for our wedding. There was no water ban in our area, but our bill would be high.
Peter had done his best to keep my garden alive while I was away. There was lettuce to eat and plenty of Swiss chard. There’d be daily meals with both for the rest of the month, with enough to spare for neighbours and visitors. There were some peas to pick, too. And soon there’d be a summer’s supply of beans, carrots, and beets. To my relief, the tomato plants appeared to be in good condition, with healthy green leaves and small green fruit. But the rapini I’d planted more than a month earlier had already bolted into bitterness and was now a total loss. Before leaving, I had set my small cabbage plants, grown first in pots on the deck, into the bed, and I could see now that only a few of them would make it to full-sized cabbages. Most surprising was the zucchini, a variety that had been so prolific the year before but was definitely underperforming now.
Next to the zucchini and butternut squash vines, the garlic stems were tall and thick, curling into scapes. If I didn’t cut the scapes, they would open as flowers, draining the plants’ energy, which I wanted directed into fattening up the cloves underground. I had first learned how to grow garlic and when to cut the scapes from a hairdresser in Toronto, a Vietnamese Canadian who kept his traditional cuisine vibrant with garlic grown in his suburban garden. It was only after Peter and I visited Vietnam that I fully realized how important fresh herbs were to the cuisine, especially to the traditional pho, and I wondered what else D had grown in his garden: hot peppers, cilantro, basil, maybe even lemon grass, which I now had growing in my own herb garden. Even though D warned me to cut the scapes, I sometimes didn’t get to them in time during busy work years. I was rewarded with big round white flower heads so beautiful my neighbour decided to plant garlic in her front flower bed. But during those years of negligence, the garlic cloves I pulled up at the end of summer were small and had little taste. When I finally became more diligent about cutting the scapes at the right time, I stored them in plastic bags in the refrigerator. Lots of recipes call for scapes to add a slight garlic taste to food, but I never found one I l
iked. Most years, they sit in my fridge for weeks until I finally throw them into a broth.
With the first inspection of the garden finished, I caught up with Peter on the deck. He admitted then that his digestive system was giving him trouble, and as we ate, I could see he was eating less than before I’d left for my trip.
“It’s not like before, though,” he said to reassure me. “There’s no problem with my swallowing.” He added that there were just days now when his new, reduced stomach couldn’t handle the food he ate.
As someone who had spent too much time in hospital beds as a child, prodded by nurses and doctors, Peter never liked to talk about the inner workings of his body. Part of becoming an adult was being able to keep that all to himself. But now he talked to me about his digestive system in a way he never would have before. We booked an appointment with our family doctor to find ways to deal with his new problems and we finally bought a good digital scale to keep an accurate record of his weight at home. On the last day of June, we discovered he was down to 162 pounds, from the 187 he’d been in April. With the desserts and wines of Spain, I’d gained weight and I was not far behind him.
Peter had been reading as much as he could about digestion and weight loss after esophageal cancer surgery, and nothing he was experiencing was beyond the limits of the normal body response. On one site he visited online, a Harvard doctor’s site, the doctor reported that when a man who had gone through the same surgery as Peter complained of digestive problems, he told him that it had only been a year; it was early days.
Despite the setbacks, on the July long weekend we drove to visit A and D in New York State. We had met them on a train trip in India eleven years earlier and had been exchanging visits ever since. We drove that weekend to their second home, a house on top of a mountain road that overlooked the Adirondacks one way and the Catskills the other. A had been adding fruit trees to the property over the years: apples, plums, and peaches. She and her husband, a man who gently blamed me for A’s increasing desire to garden, had dug through heavy shale to create holes big enough for each tree. Despite the conditions, many of the trees had already given them fruit.
Russian Jews by origin, A and D were hosting other Russians that weekend, and Peter was in full form, entertaining them with his stories and jokes, his booming voice as strong as ever. Perhaps only I noticed how little food he put on his plate.
While we’d lived in Toronto, our friends’ country home in New York had always been a welcome escape from the city; they had given us a key and told us to visit whenever we wanted. Each summer we drove to a pick-your-own farm with them to harvest cherries, berries, and vegetables, and this time we found black raspberries. Ever since the naturopath had told us that black raspberries were effective in reducing esophageal tumours, I’d kept up my hunt for them. When I told A, a radiologist, about the clinical studies I’d read, she helped me fill baskets with the berries.
Even so, I felt eager to get back to my own garden and to get on with finding out why eating had grown more difficult for Peter. I measured my own concerns about Peter’s eating against A’s and again felt somewhat reassured. A was a doctor, after all. She suggested a specific probiotic to improve Peter’s digestion. I stocked up on it before we left the States in case it wasn’t available in Canada.
After we got home from our short outing, my first battle in the garden was with Japanese beetles, which were already nibbling on my roses, my cherry trees, and the furry leaves of my Kentucky Wonder beans. I’d first encountered Japanese beetles the previous summer. When I’d come out one morning, I discovered roses filled with holes and metallic blue-green beetles hiding beneath the flower petals. I’d begun to read about the beetles and search for the best ways to eradicate them. There was no way to eradicate them.
It’s suspected that Popillia japonica arrived in New Jersey in 1915 as grubs in soil around the roots of irises imported from Japan. A year later the beetles emerged and began their destruction and their spread across the eastern United States. With no natural enemies in their new home, they encountered no resistance. One scientist reported that in 1923 he filled thirteen barrels with beetles shaken from the peach trees of one orchard, only to discover the trees covered again the next morning.
Even if I had been open to the idea of chemical pesticides, there were none that would kill just the beetle. Frustrated famers in the past turned to poisons that wiped out all insects in their path, including helpful bees. I was never going to use such draconian methods. I would never do anything to contribute to the depletion of the bees that are so important to our environment. And I certainly wasn’t going to travel to the States to buy harsh pesticides that were now restricted in Ontario.
In an over-the-fence chat with a neighbour at the back of our yard the first summer in our new neighbourhood, I’d complained about the damage the beetles were doing to my roses. He’d shrugged philosophically and said he simply cut all his flowers from the bushes once the beetles started to appear, which had made me wonder why he had roses at all. He’d told me there were traps I could buy, traps a former neighbour had frequently used that had helped the whole block. I’d already read that the traps were a bad idea, that the pheromones inside them attracted so many beetles, they quickly filled up and the gardener was left with even more beetles flying around. I’d told him that. With another shrug of his shoulders, he’d let the matter drop. And I became determined to not buy the traps and become the bull’s eye for beetles in the neighbourhood. Besides, in my reading, I had discovered what I thought would be my weapons of choice in this battle: a Mason jar filled with soapy warm water and a paintbrush.
Throughout the winter, when I had thought of cancer cells, I’d envisioned Japanese beetles as the bad cells eating away at the good cells of the beautiful roses. So, when I discovered I had a second year of the unwelcome invasion, I went out in the early mornings and swiped the unsuspecting beetles into a jar of warm soapy water and then swirled the water around with the paintbrush so they couldn’t get out before they drowned. I must admit I took pleasure in watching their little legs stop twitching and in counting how many beetles I’d trapped at the end of each day. At least I was able to take action against one harmful invader.
I’d done enough research to add a preventive measure in my second year of war against the Japanese beetle. Neem oil, non-toxic oil that comes from the seeds of the neem tree, native to South Asia, has long been shown to repel insects. Better still, it does no harm to bees as long as they are not on the plant when it is being sprayed. Neem oil is not registered as a pesticide in Canada and therefore isn’t sold in garden centres. However, I could find only small risks to using the product; it could damage plants if it was sprayed too heavily, too frequently, and in the heat of the day, all things I could control and monitor. Ironically, organic neem oil was considered safe enough to be sold freely in Canada for the skin and for medicinal purposes. But the small bottles available online were an expensive way to purchase it for garden use.
I found my neem oil at a local rose centre, known all over the continent for its wide selection of rose varieties. The nursery was owned by a couple who had emigrated from Switzerland. The husband especially was incredibly knowledgeable about all things horticultural and had no qualms about selling neem oil as a pesticide. I sprayed my neem oil on the roses in the early hours; the plants remained unharmed and the number of visits by Japanese beetles did decrease. I was more sparing with the spray on my beans, uncertain if the bitter oil applied to the leaves would affect the taste of my crop. Well into August, I had to visit the beans each day with my soapy water and paintbrush.
Throughout July, Peter had moments when his old irritability surfaced. In the past few peaceful years, I’d almost forgotten about the irritability that had accompanied his chronic pain before his body was surgically made even. Then I remembered how, more than two decades earlier, when we’d all become a household together, Jane and I would independently come into the kitchen and, in response to a
grimace on Peter’s face, ask, “Are you mad at me?”
It took us months to realize the morning grimaces had nothing to do with us, and we both learned to let moments of crossness slide, to save any important questions for later when Peter’s pain was better under control. This time around, I immediately recognized the grimaces as a symptom of his new pain and viewed them with alarm.
Still, Peter wanted to keep on planning our wedding. We visited an Italian caterer in St. Catharines to order appetizers. We stocked up on wine and Prosecco, bought extra cutlery at Ikea. Peter took on the task of finding someone who would marry us. Neither of us wanted a religious ceremony, and through our real-estate lawyer in town, Peter found a service called Dream Weddings. Despite the fantasy name, it seemed like a good fit. An officiant who could legally marry couples would oversee whatever ceremony we wanted.
In the middle of July, the officiant, J, asked to meet us to go over our plans for the wedding. We agreed to a time one Friday afternoon in Burlington so we could pick Jane up at the GO Train station there and bring her home for the weekend. As we talked in a coffee shop, J soon realized we didn’t want “the dream wedding,” and offered us the cheapest package. But as we kept scratching out lines from his script, he seemed a little alarmed that there wouldn’t be much for him to do.
We tried to tell him we were both writers, both producers, and we would write our own vows. And that was all we wanted. Even so, he didn’t seem to get how minimalist we wanted the ceremony to be. He asked who would give me away.