A Victory Garden for Trying Times

  Copyright © Debi Goodwin, 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purpose of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

  Cover image: shutterstock.com/annarepp

  Printer: Webcom, a division of Marquis Printing Inc.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: A victory garden for trying times : a memoir / Debi Goodwin.

  Names: Goodwin, Debi, author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190119497 | Canadiana (ebook) 2019011956X | ISBN 9781459745056 (softcover) | ISBN 9781459745063 (PDF) | ISBN 9781459745070 (EPUB)

  Subjects: LCSH: Goodwin, Debi. | LCSH: Goodwin, Debi—Family. | LCSH: Cancer—Patients—Family relationships. | LCSH: Gardening—Psychological aspects. | LCSH: Gardens—Psychological aspects. | LCSH: Grief. | LCSH: Widows—Biography. | LCGFT: Autobiographies.

  Classification: LCC SB454 .G66 2019 | DDC 635.092—dc23

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  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Ontario, through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and Ontario Creates, and the Government of Canada.

  Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

  Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

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  For Peter

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  BEFORE WINTER COMES each year, I plant my garlic. In late October, usually. Early enough to give the thread-thin roots time to poke out of each clove and anchor in the soil before the first hard frost stiffens the ground, but late enough so sprouts as delicately green as fresh peas won’t prematurely shoot out of the earth on warm days only to be destroyed when the killing weather descends. That year, though, I waited until November because the fall was warm. Unusually warm. And I was worn out with worry, my routines as off-kilter as climate-change weather.

  Planting any kind of vegetable — a seed, a seedling, a clove — is an act of faith: Faith that there will be enough sun, enough rain. That disease, insects, and blight can be kept at bay long enough for beets to fatten in the soil, tomatoes to turn red and sweet, beans to multiply on poles. That we will be there to harvest them. But planting garlic in the fall, expecting it to survive the winter underground and then to start transmuting one clove into a head of new cloves at the exact right time, takes a special kind of faith. Plucking fat new heads from the ground eight or nine months later is a special kind of victory.

  By the time I planted that fall, I’d had my garlic ready to go for weeks: five organic varieties from the local farmers’ market and a few heads left over from my crop of the past summer. I’d pulled the individual cloves from the heads, careful to leave as much of the papery protective cover around each clove as I could, and then I stored them in a basket in the cold cellar until it was time. “Plant them during the full moon,” a farmer at the market had told me in a low, gruff voice, as if he were sharing a secret. I missed one full moon but didn’t want to wait for another. I assumed freezing weather was on its way even in the town of Niagara-on-the-Lake, in one of the warmest zones in Ontario, where I then lived. And I wanted the garden put to bed for the year because there were more urgent things to do.

  By the time I set out to plant my garlic, we’d received a definitive diagnosis for my husband, Peter: third-stage cancer of the esophagus.

  The diagnosis came after a short holiday to celebrate my sixty-fifth birthday that fall, a trip to Colorado and beautiful New Mexico, where our faces glowed in the afternoon light and our thoughts grew darker over Peter’s increasing inability to swallow and therefore eat. In the almost twenty-seven years we’d been together, Peter had faced many physical challenges and conquered them all. We thought this was just another bump in a history of bad luck with his health. Maybe we shouldn’t have gone on that trip, but doctors had told us that Peter’s difficulties with swallowing could be anything and that swallowing problems are common as we age. We had finally made it to the specialist, a gastroenterologist in St. Catharines, the day before our departure. “Go on your holiday,” he’d said. Neither he nor anyone else had said the C-word about what seemed to be a polyp seen on an X-ray, and we were all too willing to accept their lack of concern. Blindly, I suppose.

  Peter had found me the highest sand dune in North America to climb and he was eager to finally visit Santa Fe. I thrilled at exploring natural wonders, especially empty canyons, open deserts, and dunes, while Peter was content to sit and admire them. He was eager to learn the peculiarities of a new city — its odd museums, its quirky characters, and its unique past — while I loved to photograph its architecture, its splashes of colour and personality. I didn’t want to give up my birthday trip. Peter didn’t want to ruin another of my significant birthdays with a medical crisis, as had happened before. It was just for two weeks, after all. So, we went.

  As soon as we got back, Peter underwent a probe and a biopsy that he’d scheduled before we left. After that procedure Peter had to follow up with the gastroenterologist’s office for an appointment. He was given a time two weeks later, a routine appointment. And we took that as a good sign. There was nothing urgent; this was something routine.

  But when we arrived for the appointment, we sat in the crowded waiting room, nervous, afraid of what we might hear. When the doctor, a short, grey-haired man, called us into his office, we followed him into a small, claustrophobic room with a desk in the centre. I sensed there was clutter all around me, on file cabinets, on the desk, on the walls, but they were all in my periphery; I was focused on that doctor and what he’d say. Peter introduced me as his wife but the doctor didn’t respond, didn’t even look at me. Peter and I sat down in the two chairs across from him and watched as he shuffled papers. Without a glance at us, he turned his face toward his computer screen and muttered, “It’s cancer.”

  Peter and I stared at the doctor in disbelief, waiting for something else from him, some hint of reassurance. I had to ask him what kind of cancer.

  “Cancer of the esophagus,” he replied, not returning my gaze.

&
nbsp; “How can we get treatment quickly?” I asked.

  “You can’t,” he said in a way that hit me like a snarl. “This is Ontario. There are procedures.”

  We left his office with a form for blood work and little confidence that this doctor had a plan. In the hallway, Peter and I hugged silently. On the way home, we stopped the car and called my daughter.

  “But is it really cancer?” Jane asked.

  Like me, Jane had come to think of Peter as invincible. He’d been told he had cancer before. Twice. Once, an internist, after seeing a mass on Peter’s X-ray, had operated for colon cancer only to discover Peter’s appendix had burst and the mass was dead tissue. Another time I had to rush Peter to hospital when a blood test revealed a hemoglobin count so low most people would have been dead. The first doctors we encountered that time were certain Peter had leukemia, but a clever hematologist diagnosed his inability to absorb B12 as the problem, and monthly injections of the vitamin brought back Peter’s vitality. But Peter and I both sensed that this time was different, and we told Jane so.

  “But Petey will beat it,” Jane said of the father figure she had known since she was three. “He always does.”

  I didn’t say anything; I wondered how much damage one body could take.

  At home, Peter and I cried and tried to figure out how we could make things happen. We were journalists, competent people. We knew how to put things into action. We would find the best doctor in Toronto, get a reference somehow. It was an appeal to our family doctor that got us into the well-respected Juravinski Cancer Centre in Hamilton the next week. There, we met a team of oncologists who were kind, efficient, and ready to tackle the cancer immediately. In an examining room, the lead oncologist drew a picture on the paper sheet on the bed that showed the tumour in the middle of Peter’s esophagus, and he took the time to describe the tumour with terms like squamous cell carcinoma. The word squamous sounded like squash to me, but he told us these cells were the flat cells that lined the esophagus and they were now cancerous in the location of the tumour. He talked about treatments and didn’t mince his words when it came to his anger over the slowness of the specialist in St. Catharines. And we knew we were in good hands.

  In the following weeks, a CT scan and a PET scan revealed that Peter’s tumour had spread into the surrounding lymph glands, making the cancer Stage 3. But there was still so much to learn: Could the tumour be excised after radiation and chemotherapy treatments? Would the chemotherapy destroy the stray cancer? Had the PET scan missed spots of cancer in other parts of his body?

  In my garden, I knelt on the cold ground, drew lines with a stick, dug small holes six inches apart, and dropped a garlic clove in each hole. The solitary cloves looked so pale, so small, so fragile in the cold earth. What chance did they or any of us have? I patted the soil over the point of each clove with little of the joy I usually felt at the moment I set the process of growth into motion. I couldn’t help wondering if Peter would be there to savour our late-summer favourite: bruschetta made with toppings from my garden, including fresh, finely chopped garlic. Rain began to fall on the earth. Planting my garlic that fall took all the faith I had.

  That winter, we were supposed to go somewhere warm; we had a guest house booked overlooking the sacred waters of the Ganges River and an apartment we could settle into for weeks in laid-back Goa, and there was a chance I could swing a press visit to a towering hotel that resembled a windblown sailboat on the edge of Dubai. It was how we would spend our third winter of semi-retirement. It was how it was supposed to be.

  Each day in November and into December our fingers hesitated over the computer keys, not wanting to hit the buttons to cancel the flight booked on points, the apartment carefully chosen, the guest house with the view. But by mid-December we had. Each day of January we knew where we should have been: drinking coffee in the Burj Al Arab hotel, dining in the desert under a Bedouin tent, chanting no to the touts of Varanasi. Each day in February we wondered what we would have been cooking and reading in our small Indian rooms. Not with rancour, but with the detached wistfulness of imagining someone else’s day.

  But that winter, we were home. When we weren’t out looking for answers. When we weren’t driving the hour from Niagara-on-the-Lake to Hamilton for daily radiation and weekly chemo. When we weren’t waiting anxiously for weeks after the treatments to see if surgery was possible.

  We gave up going to movies and large social events where Peter might catch a cold that could prove truly dangerous to someone whose immune system had been suppressed by chemotherapy. We did go on one outing: to a historic house up for auction on the Niagara River. Whenever we’d looked at houses in the past, I would imagine a life in every one and tell Peter where each piece of furniture could go. As we left, he’d say, “So, should we put in an offer?” and I would usually answer, “No,” with a list of the drawbacks of the property. It drove him crazy. But on that day, we both played the game. The old house needed extensive renovations and had bedrooms on the second floor, which we’d always ruled out for our retirement years. Yet we wandered through the oversized house, deciding where our offices and a new kitchen would be. We never made an offer; we both knew that the house was a complete fantasy, but it was one we needed on a fearful winter day.

  I’ve always leaned toward hibernation in winter; that year I bordered on becoming a hermit. Among the feel-better aphorisms on Facebook there was one that rang true to me during those dark months: “The answer to loneliness is solitude.” I’ve known that ever since I was a small child disappearing into the orchard of my family farm to get away from all the noisy, busy people who had little time for me. Then, I built forts in the dirt, felt safe sitting among the trees and vegetables. As an adult, I had to have a reason to be in the dirt. A passion for gardening became my excuse, my escape, my therapy.

  When I’m angry, weeds in my garden don’t have a chance. I pull out those suckers the way boxers hit punching bags, with all my force and a clenched face. A single weed can represent the whole universe or one person: the ex, a boss, anyone I feel has done me wrong. And once that weed is out of the ground and wilting in a basket, some of the powerlessness along with the fear and the insecurities that created my anger dry up, too. And I can sit on the ground calm enough to find perspective and a way forward. When I’m less angry, just mildly annoyed, I deadhead plants, cutting off the dried flowers so new ones will grow. When I’m sad, I contemplate the garden, letting its curves, its textures, its colours soothe me like a warm bath. When I’m happy — and that happens frequently in the garden — I pick vegetables, herbs, and flowers to bring into the house along with my joy. To nurture myself and others.

  In the space of a year in our new house, I’d come to know its garden more intimately than the sunspots on my arms. The previous owners had spent sixteen years turning a double lot into a garden with flowering trees, sculpted shrubs, rose bushes, hydrangeas, rhododendrons, and one of the most glorious flowering dogwood trees in town. It was too fussy a garden for my taste, so slowly I’d changed each bed to suit me, to transform this highly managed garden into something that felt like my own. As I worked, I came to know the needs of each inch of the garden — where the purslane, the knotweed, and the clover leaves of the yellow wood sorrel would burst through the soil; where plants would wither most quickly in the dry spells; where I had to move perennials to give others extra space.

  We had a few overarching principles for the redesign: Peter and I both wanted more trees, especially evergreens to naturally fence the limits of our two-hundred-foot-deep lot. I wanted more rocks everywhere, having left behind in Toronto a garden filled with twenty years’ worth of rock collecting. But above all else, I wanted more food from the garden. I wanted fruit trees, a dedicated herb garden, and larger plots for vegetables. In the first full summer, I dug up a flower garden to create a second vegetable patch for the following year and chose locations for more trees and berry bushes. All I had to do was wait for the next spring.

&
nbsp; In December, the lawn was still a vibrant green, the kale producing new shoots. Every time I looked out the window, I had the illusion that I could get back to the garden any day. El Niño was with us that winter, and a sharpened awareness of the real threat of climate change. While I welcomed the clear roads on our daily drives to Hamilton, others found the lack of snow in the early winter creepy, another sign the world, so tense over terrorist attacks and the flood of refugees from the war in Syria, was out of control. The state of the Canadian economy didn’t help the mood much. While we appreciated the cheap price of gas, we fretted over falling commodity markets and the darkening financial outlook for our country. And as our loonie dove lower against the American greenback, we bemoaned eight-dollar cauliflowers and spotted green beans at five dollars a pound. In the back of my mind, past the worry, an idea seeded that I would increase the amount of organic vegetables I grew as a way to cope with the world’s trying times and to do my bit for the planet.

  If it had been any other season — spring, summer, or fall —

  I would have been out in the garden for hours each day pulling weeds, trimming, digging, watering, whatever needed doing, whatever soothed me. And I would have ended the day so tired I could have slept.

  But that winter, when I couldn’t dig in the garden, I needed something else to do to quiet my mind. I’d given up sessional teaching because of its restrictions. I’d spent the previous winter painting rooms in colours called Elephant’s Breath, Smoked Trout, and Paul Revere Pewter, and I’d arranged all the fixes to our new home so we’d be free to write and travel now. We felt we’d earned that breathing space in our lives. Peter certainly had.

  Chronic pain had clung to him. His story of medical trauma had started when he was just an infant who contracted polio; it had led to a lifetime of mobility issues, including one year in a body cast. In a bed. As an adolescent. Surgery three years before his cancer diagnosis had repaired much of the damage to his left leg and hip and had left him pain-free for the first time in his life — he just woke up and the pain was gone. It was our time to savour what we’d accomplished.