by Debi Goodwin
On the other side of the yard, in the new bed, the garlic I’d planted after we’d received word of Peter’s diagnosis was ready to be harvested. The tops were starting to die back, and when I checked one bulb it came out fat and moist. I carefully dug out the rest of the heads and set my forty-five organic bulbs in a basket to dry for a few days. My faith on that cold November day in garlic’s natural ability to survive had paid off. I sat back on the lawn beside the basket and made myself take a moment to admire the bulbs of pink, grey, and white and to appreciate the miracle of their growth. But I soon became distracted by practicalities. I quickly calculated how much garlic to store in the basement for winter, how much to set aside for my fall planting, and how much I would use fresh in the tortes and salads I was making for the wedding.
In the same bed as the garlic, the zucchini had gone from poor to a total writeoff. After I’d harvested small fruit for a few meals and two large ones for bread, the plants stopped producing. I didn’t know if there’d been too much dry heat that year or if there hadn’t been enough sun in the new garden bed, but alongside the zucchini, small butternut squashes were popping up on vines that circled around trees and flowering plants. They would be my Cucurbita success story for the season.
I always go into overdrive when I’m preparing for a group of guests, but in preparation for our wedding, I moved in a mad frenzy, knowing how much this day mattered to us, both in the confirmation of our relationship and as a way of willing a long future together. For weeks, I’d been checking the forecast for the day. When I first started looking, there was nothing but the historic average with a 30 percent chance of rain. As the day grew closer, a high probability of rain was forecast for August fifth and sixth, and then just the sixth or just the fifth, and so on. I, who had been wishing for rain all summer and had been grateful when it finally came, saw rain on our wedding day as a bad omen, not just an inconvenience. But by the middle of the actual week, we knew we’d have a glorious summer day with some of the humidity we’d been suffering through dropping away.
Jane arrived the evening of August third. She’d taken three days off from her job. Her enthusiasm and energy made the final preparations fun. Even though time was getting tight on the day before the wedding, she insisted she and I both go for manicures and pedicures, her idea of what a bride did. Some ideas about tradition had skipped a generation, it seemed. I found the only nail salon in Niagara-on-the-Lake, a shop in the Virgil section of the sprawling town, and we booked the only appointments they had at the end of the day. That morning we finished the final garden touch-ups. While I deadheaded, Jane worked on the grass edging. At one point, in what we all jokingly called her obsessive ways, she gave up on the edging tool and got down on her knees to trim the grass that hung over the flower beds with scissors. Jane had been slow in feeling comfortable in our new house, so removed from Toronto, but in the past year she’d come to appreciate the quiet of the yard and the methodical tasks she could lose herself in. As her love for the garden grew, I felt I was passing on something good to her.
In the late afternoon, after we had all the dishes and glasses organized and the neighbours’ chairs and tables on the lawn, we drove to the nail salon, where it became apparent the only woman still there didn’t want to bother with us. She said she would have to work on us one at a time and it would take three hours in total. Even Jane balked at the idea, so we went home and painted our own toenails.
The next morning was a blur of small tasks, but again it was Jane who made me stop for a moment. Together, we wandered the garden collecting hydrangeas of pink, blue, and white for bouquets. I showed her how I’d added the tall, springy gaura to a vase once and she eagerly wanted to include both the pink and white varieties. I’ve never thought flowers were the hosta’s strong suit or even the point of the plant, but Jane loved the thick stems with the pure white buds, so we cut some of those for her bouquet and I added some ferns to mine.
Throughout the morning, we both insisted Peter rest all he could so he would have energy for the afternoon. I had asked TA, the woman who occasionally cleaned our house of the garden dirt I tracked in, to help with the final cleaning jobs that day and to prepare the trays of Prosecco and wine that she, Jane, and my town friend H would serve with hors d’oeuvres when the guests arrived. TA had been coming to us since we moved into the house almost two years earlier. She was a single mother, a clever woman who could have found any number of jobs but took on housecleaning because when her son had been young she’d needed the flexibility of getting to his school whenever she was wanted. There was much in TA’s story I could connect to; I’d certainly sought flexibility in my work when Jane was young. TA had been solicitous when she’d learned of Peter’s cancer, and her kindly inquiries had always been comforting.
TA saved the day when she helped Jane and me figure out how to unfold and mount the canopy I’d bought for the service on the lawn in front of the vegetable garden, and she kept the kitchen organized before and after the ceremony. Later, when she left, TA would refuse any payment. Her day of work was part of her wedding gift to us, she said. The other part was a concrete stone with the date of our marriage and our names stamped on it. “I know how much you love your garden,” she said when I thanked her.
If the morning went by in a blur, the afternoon went by at hyperspeed. Just as we were finishing laying out the cheese and dessert trays, a bevy of people appeared on our lawn. The event was on. My anxiety over getting things right and over Peter’s health gave way to excitement.
Peter was already dressed in his wedding clothes: new pants and jacket with a blue shirt. He’d bought the pants on the July weekend we’d driven through New York State. They were a couple of sizes down from ones he’d worn a year earlier. But when he’d tried the new pants on a few days before the wedding, they’d bunched around his waist. He hadn’t wanted me to drive to the mall for a smaller size, so I’d washed them and thrown them in the dryer to try to shrink them. But they were still too large for him on our wedding day. Only his belt kept them in place.
“I hope people don’t think I’m dying,” he said.
Peter went out to meet our guests while TA, Jane, and H got the trays of drinks and hors d’oeuvres ready. H’s husband, A, had come early with her, eager to help. I appointed him wine steward and went out into the yard.
Traffic from Toronto had been heavy and some guests were late arriving, but we finally decided to start the ceremony so our officiant, J, could get on with his day and our guests didn’t have to wait too long. I went in the house to change into an off-white tunic. I’d bought the tunic in a mall in Casablanca when I’d been there in June. In the shop’s mirror I had looked slim enough in it. But unlike Peter, I had not grown smaller. I’d been stress eating for months, and although for the most part I ate healthily, my middle had grown wider. I could never have imagined that on our wedding day our weights would be so close.
But it was too late to come up with anything else to wear and I forgot my self-consciousness once Jane and I stepped out of the house together with our bouquets to meet Peter under the canopy. If I could stop time, I would stop it for the half hour or so when Jane read “Amazing Grace” in a voice full of emotion, when Peter and I spoke of our love to each other and made our vows. I had insisted on going first because there was never a doubt in my mind that Peter was the more powerful speaker. In my vows, I told Peter that he had always made me laugh, made me think, made my heart grow two sizes bigger every day.
“I have always loved and cherished you,” I said as a reminder of vows I’d adhered to if not publicly spoken. “I will always love and cherish you. I have been with you in sickness and health. I will always be with you in sickness and health and through the good and the bad, the times of joy and the times of sorrow. I have always held you. I will always hold you in my heart.”
And of course, Peter did speak more eloquently. “To describe myself as a lucky man is to truly beggar the language,” he said to the friends and family
who had formed a semicircle around the canopy. “Nothing I have done in the past quarter century — becoming a dad, truly learning the meaning of love, travelling the world, learning to walk a third time, confronting cancer, becoming me — none of this would have been possible without the support, companionship, and encouragement of this remarkably generous woman who stands next to me.”
He ended by seemingly going off in a direction no one could understand, although those who knew Peter and his long stories well must certainly have known there would be a point eventually. I stood beside Peter, smiling, knowing what that point would be. He described how sixty years before we’d met, astronomer Edwin Hubble had discovered that the universe was expanding.
“All the while we think we are living in a constant. It was not so,” he said. “The very structure enveloping us was growing. And this year, appropriately enough, the Hubble telescope gathered data that indicates the expansion of the universe is expanding — the growth is growing upon itself.”
In his typical fashion, Peter paused, leaving his audience confused before the aha moment. “You might conceivably wonder why I have wandered off into this odd exploration of astrophysics, but there is a reason. Whenever I have tried to put into words what living with and loving Debi is all about, it always comes down to this. I love her as much as the universe itself and that is constantly expanding.”
I closed the few steps between us to kiss Peter, ignoring the officiant’s words, “Not yet.”
Later, in a backhanded compliment to Peter’s vows, a friend of his joked, “You know every man here hates you.”
But while Peter had been speaking, I glowed in his words and the depths of his emotions. Perhaps I was a little surprised he shared his private endearment; it felt a little bit as though he wanted it out there while there was time.
I had not included my own endearment, which I often said in response to his. “I love you a bushel” — pause for effect — “and a peck.” It was the farmer’s version, and he understood that for a scrimping farmer to add the peck to the bushel was a big deal. Those endearments always seemed to symbolize the joy of our union, a union between a brilliant man of ideas, philosophy, and soulful searching and a smart woman of the earth and instinct.
During the ceremony Jane forgot to make the recording on her phone she said she’d make. We’d all forgot to cut a fresh rosebud for Peter’s lapel before the ceremony. And after, I forgot to get a photograph of Peter and me alone because I wanted to get the buffet ready for the guests and I could see he was tired and wanted to sit down. Later, I’d make an album of the photographs that were taken by friends and came to accept them as the record of the day, even if the netting for the peas and the tomato stakes appeared in the background, even if my vain streak found my skin and hair too white in the bright afternoon sun. But none of what didn’t happen mattered in the end. We were all happy about what did happen that afternoon.
After Jane went back to Toronto the next day, Peter and I settled in for a relaxing end to the summer. He booked us tickets for plays at the Shaw Festival. We made a list of activities we wanted to do before the warm weather ended. We had a social calendar for the first time in a while. D, the octogenarian sexton of the local Anglican church, a man who takes pleasure in his town and his life to heights I’ve rarely seen, invited Peter and me over to dinner. We sat in his lush garden as the light dimmed and the crickets chirped, in a magical space that made me feel I was somewhere in the Deep South, while two Scotties with muddy paws jumped all over my off-white linen pants. D and his friend, also D, had heard of our wedding and feted us with pink roses from the famous rose grower in town and joked about the newlyweds. I had warned them both that Peter wouldn’t eat much, but even so they both looked shocked at the serving Peter took, which covered one small corner of his plate.
Two days later we went to a cinq à sept. Having people over for late-afternoon drinks on a Friday, we’d learned, is a popular way of getting together in Niagara-on-the-Lake. This time we went to the refurbished house of a man whom I’d met on my press trip to Spain. Both he and his wife were in their seventies, swam at a hotel pool each morning, and walked hand in hand around town after days spent writing. Their home in the older part of town was eclectic and filled with sunny art and books. We knew they were people we’d like to know better.
They were both vegetarians who only ate organic. I’d already given them yellow beets and chard from my garden and that day took them a basket filled with carrots, more beets, tomatoes, kale, and more chard. I liked taking produce as gifts and that year, especially, filling a basket for someone else rarely made a dent. We followed up with emails that ended with an invitation to visit them in their home in Santa Fe that fall if we could.
Visiting and travels were much on our minds. Peter was working on the idea of doing two radio documentaries for CBC during our month in Rome. He had the flights booked, as well as a small apartment in the Trastevere neighbourhood. And we talked about taking a driving trip in September to Washington, D.C., to visit friends and see the Victory Garden at the Smithsonian. We both assumed, or perhaps just wished, that Peter’s problems with eating and back pain would end soon.
When we weren’t planning or socializing, we sat on our deck admiring a garden that now gave me a reprieve. By mid-August, the tasks in the garden were fewer. I could do as much or as little as I wanted. I even spent one afternoon reading in the hammock under the trees at the back of the yard.
Soon enough, though, the Victory Garden could not be ignored. The beans became prolific, so I blanched enough for winter soups and got them in the freezer. The tomatoes, once they took to ripening, came on fast. Since the wedding, it had rained often enough that they had doubled in size, leaving stretch marks at one end. Each day I picked the Romas and spread them out on the counter in the basement. Each day, more turned red. I made my first batch of tomato sauce with carrots, garlic, and basil from the garden and local onions. I also bought local corn, which I cooked and stripped the niblets from for the freezer. Usually about this time, Peter would be preparing small packs of pesto for the winter, too, but he hadn’t got through the last summer’s supply and showed no interest in making the sauce he loved so much.
Even as I squirrelled away food for the cold months, I wondered why I was doing it. Each time I opened the freezer door, bags of zucchini and banana muffins we’d baked rolled out. We liked to take the muffins in the car or on the GO Train when we went into Toronto so Peter would have something to eat every two hours, but he hadn’t wanted any of the muffins in a while.
In the middle of August, in the midst of all my cooking, we drove to Hamilton for Peter’s second CT scan. We felt no great anxiety the day he got it or during the wait for the results; the first one in May had been clear, and since all of Peter’s symptoms matched everything we’d learned about his recovery, we saw no reason to fear that this one would show any cancer.
The Sunday after the scan, I turned to the second phase of the Victory Garden: planting radishes, lettuce, and spinach for fall crops. And I tried to see if I could revitalize the zucchini. I fed the plants with Muskie Fish Emulsion Fertilizer, recommended for tomatoes by M, a successful urban gardener I knew. One plant in the bed appeared to be rotten where the stem met the root, so I pulled it up, only to discover it led to a long, vibrantly green vine of butternut squash that supported two decently sized squash and several baby ones. I made my lunch that day with a stir-fry from the garden of tomatoes that needed to be used, orange and yellow carrots, green beans, and beet greens. I topped the dish with the baby squash and fresh Thai basil. It was the way I loved to eat in the summer. It was the victory of growing my own vegetables. But the victory felt hollow. I knew I was nourishing myself. I just didn’t know how to nourish Peter.
And his eating problems were getting to him. Throughout the cancer treatment, Peter had displayed his usual steely resolve to do what had to be done. But we just hadn’t been expecting what he was going through now. There seemed n
o single goal here; the answers were elusive. His digestive system wouldn’t behave and he had continuous stomach cramps or bloating. And I didn’t know how to help. But I worried he was sinking into a form of depression I’d only seen him go through after his father died and as his arthritis grew more debilitating before the orthopedic surgery gave him new hope for a long, fruitful life and the incentive to travel again and move to our new home.
One day that week, as Peter was drinking chocolate milk, a fly flew into his glass. He seemed to take it personally, as if the world were out to get him. I didn’t like him thinking that way. And I finally said something about it. I said he had been through so much and none of it was fair, but if he let himself fall into a downward spiral, it would only make things worse. One small victory we’d gained in our communications that year was in saying openly what we thought and accepting what we heard. Time was too precious for holding back or resenting honestly spoken words. Peter thanked me for the reminder.
His eating problems were affecting me, too. As I planted the radish seeds, I wondered why I was bothering growing more food. But then as I stood in the garden, I admired the miracle of how the leaves curled around a cabbage plant, swirling to form a head. It was a beautiful thing. And as I watered the radish seeds I remembered a saying I’d come across: “They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.” We were a defiant couple.
On the Monday, I baked. I don’t bake much; Peter has always been the baker in the house. Before he got sick, he would bake a loaf of sourdough bread every week from starter we kept in the fridge. I’d thrown the starter out in the fall when Peter stopped eating bread, because the jar of starter just kept getting bigger each time I fed it. Containers of different flours still sat in the pantry. I hadn’t had the heart to throw them out yet.