A Victory Garden for Trying Times

by Debi Goodwin

  But I had no idea if I wanted to stay in the house that had been Peter’s final home or move somewhere else. Even then, I knew I couldn’t escape the loneliness of life without him just by changing residences.

  I had no heart for plotting my vegetable beds for the next year, although I needed to figure out a new spot to plant the garlic. It was time. Had it just been a year since I’d last set cloves in the soil with so much fear and hope? I lacked both the energy and the faith to start drawing maps with well-spaced rows and the promise of perfect vegetables for a season that seemed impossibly far off. In the end, I decided the easiest plan was to plant my garlic cloves at the other end of the smaller bed where I’d planted them the year before and worry about the larger vegetable patch later.

  As I carried out the garlic I’d grown in my Victory Garden, I told myself I was just doing a job on a list. I reminded myself that grief, like writing or keeping a garden, is step by step, clove by clove. Besides, if I were alive the next year, I’d still have to eat. But as I knelt on the ground, some of the old magic came back. Not a thrill, exactly, like I was birthing new plants or anything that profound. But a spark of faith that the cloves I was dropping into the soil would survive buried in the darkness; that once again they would slowly transform into fat roots and healthy shoots. They were programmed to do that. But what would my change be over the winter? There was no program I knew of that preordained what the darkness of grief would do to me.

  Before I could put the whole yard to bed, I had to get all the furniture and hoses into the shed. I put away the garden Buddha,

  the top of a small fountain Peter and I had bought the year before for the soothing sound of water. I put away the chairs, the orange cushions, and the tables. Each job took me farther from Peter’s last summer in the garden, erasing his presence from the yard. Each object I set on a shelf or in a corner of the shed increased my doubt of making it through the winter to another spring when I’d see them again.

  The sun was getting low in the sky on that November afternoon. Without the sunshine, a chill was settling into my bones. With cold hands, I filled the watering can to complete my work for the day by watering the freshly planted garlic so the earth would compact around those cloves and hold them tight. As I stood in the peace of our yard, listening for the songs of birds and a single voice that had disappeared, I knew that somewhere inside me I had, like the inner knowledge of the garlic clove, a will to push myself into the light again.

  After my separation in my thirties, when I thought I’d never have much of a life beyond caring for Jane, I had blossomed. And preferred the person I became, the partner I became with Peter, a man who saw me as I was. But this was different, I told myself. I had no desire to blossom or even come to accept Peter’s death. I couldn’t shake off my feelings that to thrive was to betray him, to give up on his memory. The garden had no clear answers for me that fall day; all it could do was allow me the quiet and the space to jump from despair to hope to despair.

  The one task that gave me true pleasure in my last week in the garden was spreading my compost from a summer’s worth of food and yard waste. When I opened the bins, I didn’t have to fake the joy I felt at all the new soil I’d created. I threw bucket after bucket of it over the vegetable beds, breathing in its sweet aroma, running my hands through its soft richness. I knew the compost would ameliorate my soil and provide a home for soil microbes, so vital to my crops. But my joy was more than the satisfaction of a vegetable gardener building a healthy plot of land. I couldn’t put my finger on what I was feeling until later, when I read some research that claimed that mere contact with Mycobacterium vaccae, found in soil, releases serotonin in the brain. I wondered if long ago, when I’d dug in the dirt as a toddler waiting by a gate, I’d made that discovery myself. I know that dirt always makes me happier, gives me resilience to face life when the odds are against me. I think Peter knew it, too. Sometimes my hands would be so covered in dirt, I’d approach him on the deck with a kissy face and hands raised as though I might rub them through his hair and over his face. He never flinched. He always just smiled.

  From despair to hope to despair to hope. Perhaps, just perhaps, in the coming spring, in my garden, on my knees, I might find some bliss again as my fingers dug in the dirt and my jeans grew muddier. And my vegetables grew. Perhaps my cancer wartime Victory Garden would become a garden of my own self-preservation.

  The happiness fresh produce gave me never really disappeared that fall, even if I couldn’t taste all its flavours. But without greens and squash from my garden, pasta smothered with my tomato sauce with a side kale salad, a bowl of neon red-pepper soup, I would have felt emptier — both in body and in soul. When I didn’t have enough vegetables from my gardens left, I drove to Lococo’s Fruits and Vegetables in Niagara Falls, a grocery store started by an Italian immigrant 110 years earlier. The store was not much more than a warehouse with three large rooms. The last room housed meats, fish, and prepared food, but I rarely stepped in there. From the first two rooms, I’d fill my cart with lettuces, berries, snow peas, and cabbages. On one day tomatoes would be cheap, on another day red peppers. I loved throwing extra peppers into my cart, surrounded by shoppers filling bag after bag with the plump red jewels at a bargain price.

  As a treat, I’d buy myself a passion fruit imported from Colombia. When Peter and I had gone to Vietnam, we’d both been enthralled by the tiny fruit cut in half and served to us first thing at breakfast. We’d hunted for them in Toronto and occasionally found them. And there they were in Lococo’s, each small ball wrapped in plastic for just under a toonie. If I bought a passion fruit on a Saturday, I’d cut it open on Sunday, place the two halves in a small bowl and ceremoniously eat the fruit at the dining-room table, remembering long Sunday brunches Peter and I shared there and the breakfast room in Vietnam where we’d first tasted the fruit. Eating passion fruit offered an exercise in gratitude and mindfulness. It doesn’t take long to scoop the yellow seeds tinged with purple from the two half orbs, and it’s easy to eat them before you’re aware you’ve finished. But I made myself lift the spoon slowly and leave the seeds on my tongue while the tart sweetness filled my mouth.

  Just as with dirt, science supports my instinct that fruits and vegetables make me happier. Before he died, Peter had emailed me some research from the University of Warwick that showed “happiness benefits were detected for each extra daily portion of fruit and vegetables up to eight portions per day.” I knew dirt and vegetables would both be strong allies on my road through grief.

  But, of course, there wasn’t enough dirt or vegetables in the universe to fill the hole in my heart. And no November could ever be gentle enough to lull me into thinking winter wasn’t coming. Besides, events that month seemed to intensify the chaos in me. The great Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen, who’d been suffering with cancer, fell and died, one of many celebrities who left the earth in 2016. What did they all know? And as I drove along a country road after my photography class on November eighth, the black skies seemed to deepen with the news that Donald Trump would become the next president of the United States, news I couldn’t digest and dissect with Peter. It was as though I were in the cracked universe of Cohen. I’ve never felt as lonely as I did driving in the only car on Concession 7 Road that night listening to the sombre voices of Michael Enright and Susan Bonner on a CBC radio special. It was going to be a long, lonely, and now disturbing winter.

  Later, on my trip to New York, I wandered through one of the shops Peter loved there, the Strand Book Store. He was first drawn to it by its motto: “18 miles of books.” I wouldn’t buy any books that day, only a calendar with trees to remind me of Peter every day in the new year and a button that read “Fuck 2016.” In the liberal shops of New York, the button referred to Trump’s election and all the havoc he might wreak. For me it was far more personal.

  As late November frost settled on the roof of the house, all the bleakest questions from the days after Peter’s death return
ed to freeze my heart, threatening to block the new cracks in my grief. What could we have done differently? Why did this happen? If I’d loved Peter more, put him before me, would he still be alive?

  But then I noticed a change in tone to the questions: What will I do? What will I become? How can I keep Peter’s memory alive and allow new things, new people to come into my life? How will I become self-reliant and find concrete ways to work through my grief ? What would the Martian do?

  My guilt that Peter was dead and I was not still stuck in my throat like food in a cancerous esophagus. But I couldn’t deny that the energy of life coursed through my body. That there was light pushing its way into the cracks, that the resilience I found by playing in the dirt surrounded by trees would get me through. And I came to believe that this was the victory Peter had urged me to find.

  Just before November ended, I found a Vesey’s seed catalogue for 2017 in my mailbox. At first, I thought of throwing it out; its shiny, colourful pages reminded me too much of the foolish hope I’d placed in creating a Victory Garden a year earlier. But, instead, I left it on a stool in the kitchen. The next morning, as I sipped my coffee and the sun rose higher behind the bare trees at the back of the yard, washing the kitchen with a warm, shadowy light, I picked up the catalogue. Just a quick peek, I told myself. I’m not ready to order anything. I probably won’t get any seeds this year. But by the time I began to flip through the alphabet of vegetables and arrived at beets, I was hooked. Slowly, I stood up to get a pen from my office. And then I began to circle my choices.

  Acknowledgements

  MY DEEPEST THANKS to everyone at Dundurn Press, especially Kathryn Lane and Rachel Spence for their enthusiastic response to my submission, and to Allison Hirst, Laura Boyle, Heather McLeod, and Elena Radic for their work on this book. Beyond Dundurn, thank you to Arun Kapur for the author’s photo and Susan Fitzgerald.

  I first wrote this as I lived it, relying on meticulous notes I took after each medical appointment, gardening step, and situation I found myself in. Along the way, I was encouraged by early readers Olenka Demianchuk and Nita Pronovost, and supported — as always — by my amazing writers’ group: Maria Cioni, Maria Coletta McLean, Janet Looker, Shelley Saywell, Barbara Tran, and Jamie Zeppa. I’m grateful for Hedgebrook’s Master Class in Goa, India, in 2018, where fellow writers and instructor Elmaz Abinader treated sections of my work with kindness. Elmaz’s insistence that I “drill down” helped me immensely with my rewrite.

  Digging through research is almost as much fun as digging in the soil. I spent hours at the Toronto Reference Library reading wartime newspapers and garden books. In the New York Public Library, I pored over old how-to booklets and the proceedings of National Victory Gardens Conferences. Of all the books I consulted, three helped me the most: Cecilia Gowdy-Wygant’s comprehensive Cultivating Victory: The Women’s Land Army and the Victory Garden Movement, Twigs Way’s The Wartime Garden: Digging for Victory, and the online reproduction of Charles Lathrop Pack’s 1919 book, The War Garden Victorious. Mine is by no means a scholarly work, but I sought multiple sources and tested my knowledge on the head gardener at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., as he planted his replica Victory Garden in the spring of 2018.

  Unlike a book, grief has no ending. I have leaned on friends and family and sought ways to move forward at a retreat and with a wise social worker. I am thankful for them all. Through the incredible services of Hospice Niagara, I have walked with the bereaved and hiked in awe-inspiring woods. I’ve been sustained by fellow travellers on this grief journey; no one should go through a deep loss alone.

  Finally, my endless gratitude to the two people who have been my life’s greatest gifts: My daughter, Jane Awde Goodwin — the kindest person I know — gave me free rein with her thoughts and words. And I am beyond thankful for the love and guidance of Peter Kavanagh, who read many of these pages with his calm, generous, but firm insistence that I carry on with the project. How I wish he could hold this book, with a different ending, in his hands.

  Book Credits

  Acquiring Editor: Kathryn Lane

  Developmental Editor: Allison Hirst

  Managing Editor: Elena Radic

  Editorial Assistant: Melissa Kawaguchi

  Copy Editor: Susan Fitzgerald

  Designer: Sophie Paas-Lang

  Publicist: Saba Eitizaz