A Victory Garden for Trying Times Read online

  We’d started a blog together called The Third Phase to document life after work and the issues of aging. What had we done wrong to have this phase snatched away so quickly? Expected too much? Loved each other too much? What the frigging fuck?

  With our schedule so full of medical appointments, I doubted I’d ever find the focus to write anything good again. So, I joined a group to sponsor a Syrian refugee family. I signed up for a photography course. Anything to fill in the gaps between treatments, to decrease the hours of waiting and fear. But they were not enough. Nothing was enough to plaster over the hole in my heart. Mostly, I ended up spending mindless hours playing Mah-Jong on my iPad.

  We both sought comfort in routine. Each morning, I walked down the half flight of stairs from our bedroom to find Peter at his desk already working at his computer, my heart skipping to see him still there.

  “So,” he’d say, and then immediately begin to explain some new detail he’d learned about the expansion of the universe, our provincial government’s contempt for unions, or the closing of the last school in town. You just never knew.

  Even if Peter had brought me a coffee in bed, as he often did, I’d sidestep toward the kitchen, craving a second cup before I could face the encyclopedia of his brain.

  When we’d first spotted our house online, I’d known immediately where Peter’s office would be. We’d had a wall built with pocket doors to create a room in the cavernous space off the entry, and I’d arranged the dark oak bookshelves from his old office to wrap around the walls. He’d picked out a desk that had an insert in the front for more books. My first view as I came downstairs those mornings was Peter in his womb of books.

  “You can never have too many books,” he’d say to anyone who didn’t understand his need to be surrounded by knowledge and language. Who didn’t understand that for the bedridden, other people’s adventures and stories of easy movements in the world freed a mind from the confines of one’s own.

  Each morning, once I had my second coffee in hand, I headed to my office at the back of the house, with its pale maple furnishings gathered from rooms in our old house. I stared at the photos on my desk as the computer booted up. Jane at five on a ferry to Manitoulin Island, strands of red hair flying above her head in the wind, her eyes screwed tight in pure joy. Peter on a trip to Turkey, handsome and pensive as he contemplated something in the distance he’d make a note about to research later. These were my peeps, the people who’d given me some of my life’s sweetest moments: the three of us on the L-shaped couch in the old house watching a movie from Blockbuster with Schmidt the schnauzer curled up at our feet; Peter and Jane on a snowy Sunday intent on a Lord of the Rings marathon — director’s cut; Peter laughing with his whole body at a poem Jane wrote him for Christmas morning; Peter sipping grappa at Florian’s in St. Mark’s Square as the orchestra played and the cool night air of Venice caressed our bare arms; Jane and Peter negotiating their relationship when he came into her life (she to be the only person in the whole wide world allowed to call him Pete or Petey, he the only one who could call her kid); me driving them on the interstate to visit our friends A and D in New York while I pretended to be in the chorus of Bruce Springsteen’s “Rocky Ground” and they were my silent audience; Peter’s bread; Peter’s rice and beans; Peter’s mashed potatoes pounded into smooth submission with his remarkable upper-body strength we assumed he’d inherited from his stevedore grandfather; the hugs of those strong arms. How could I ever exist without either Peter or Jane? What would I even be?

  I quickly looked away from the photographs, typed in my password, and waited. The new house was quiet, always quiet. But what if the silence I loved went on and on? What if Peter’s mellifluous voice — a storyteller’s voice, a voice that still thrilled me with endearments — stopped reverberating in this house? I fingered one of the small rocks on my desk that I’d found in the southwest, the one shaped like a heart with a crack that ran down its side.

  Then, instead of attempting to write, I hunched over the keyboard and searched the internet for causes of esophageal cancer and survival rates, the browser’s memory filling in the words after the first letters I tapped. Nothing answered my questions; nothing gave me any assurance Peter would make it out alive. It was nothing but an exercise of masochism in the morning.

  At some point, I must have started searching food sites, perhaps for a list of ingredients that combat cancer. I did that a lot. I don’t recall how, but I found myself suddenly staring at an archival plan for a Victory Garden, the type of garden so heavily promoted on two continents during two world wars to push anyone with a plot of dirt to grow their own vegetables. But it was like magic when I did. What I knew about Victory Gardens then was they were about hope, about fighting back against enemies trying to take away what you had. Outside my window, the vegetable patch lay dormant under a layer of straw to keep down the weeds over the winter. But in my head, I could see it thriving. I could see myself walking between the rows, tying a tomato plant to a pole here, thinning the new beets there, pulling a weed now and again. And I could see Peter in that picture. Not in the garden. The garden was my domain. But I could see him in the yard. See a future there with both of us in it. Is that how victories come? By imagining them first?

  The map was a legal-sized piece of paper, sepia coloured. From the Second World War. American. On twenty-nine lines, it listed the vegetables needed to sustain a family of five for a year on a plot of land twenty-five feet by fifty feet. Vegetables I’d eaten as a child like potatoes, green beans, and tomatoes shared space with lima beans, collard greens, and rutabagas, relics of my grandmother’s era. Although the vegetables were just names, I could picture each one, see its wholeness, smell its freshness, taste its hope. My garden would be different. There’d be kale, squash, and arugula with the beets, beans, and tomatoes, and more if I could squeeze them in. It was bounty I wanted, proof of life in my own backyard. A Victory Garden over the fear that cancer had brought into our home. A Victory Garden for trying times.

  With a tingle of excitement in my fingers, I searched for nursery sites, videos of Midwest farmers planting in the forties, methods for improving my soil. As my own Victory Garden took shape in my mind, it wasn’t joy I felt, but the possibility there could be joy again.

  I jumped from my chair with an energy I hadn’t had in weeks. The casters pushed up the silk Indian carpet but I didn’t stop to smooth it down.

  “Yo, Pete,” I yelled. “Wanna whooping?” It was our code for a break and a game of backgammon at the dining table in the great room. No one else used our code; no one else ever would. In our Toronto house, we’d both chuckled when one of us had yelled the challenge outside, wondering what the neighbours would think.

  Peter had taught me to play backgammon in the first few months of our connection. In his walk-up apartment. With our clothes back on. I went on to be the player who won most often, something that delighted him. He kept score wherever we travelled and had yet to find a country he could win in, a story he loved to tell. A for Argentina was off the list. So was E for England, F for France. And I for Italy and India. T for Turkey and V for Vietnam and so on. But we still had so much of the alphabet to go.

  As he walked to the table with a slight hitch to his gait and the familiar click of his cane, which he was using less and less, I said, “I think I have a project.”

  I told him about the Victory Garden. And he nodded. Pleased.

  He always told visitors that he was feeling fine, that this “cancer thing” was harder on me than on him. I knew he didn’t like to be a burden, but I still found the comment strange. He was the one facing his mortality. What was I facing? I gave it as little thought as I could. Perhaps I kept the truth hidden like furballs, one in my throat and one in the bottom of my gut.

  For now, there was the planning of a Victory Garden to fill the cold hours of winter. I threw the dice on the wooden board with a clack. There were seed catalogues to get, measuring to do, nutritional needs of plan
ts to be learned.

  “That’ll be great,” he said, throwing his own dice. He began to talk books, a blog, the drone he’d buy to photograph the garden’s growth. But I wasn’t really listening. My head was already past the great room’s wall of windows, in the garden the next summer, coaxing my tomatoes and cutting chard while Peter sat on the deck, watching me and learning new things.

  Chapter Two

  I SUSPECT PETER RECOGNIZED how perfectly this project suited me before I did, in that way a true partner sees the other and their needs so clearly. It was one of the things I loved about him and had come to depend on.

  A Victory Garden was the perfect project for me, especially now that I lived in the Niagara Region, an area so connected to my past.

  I’d grown up with my parents and three siblings on a small fruit farm — about thirty acres — in Grimsby, Ontario, a town located between Hamilton and Niagara Falls. The farm rested below the escarpment on an old seabed, where the receding waters had left behind rich soil that was especially fertile for fruits like peaches. From my bedroom window, I could see Lake Ontario beyond the rows of trees and, on a clear day, across the lake to Toronto and the tall buildings that grew up there as I grew from a toddler with a teepee and a rocking horse in my room to a teenager in a miniskirt listening to the Beatles, wanting to be elsewhere. Since my father was the principal of the only high school in town, I had a greater incentive to leave than most. And, like many a farm kid, I longed, through my school years, to get to the city where I thought my life would truly start, without realizing how much the red-brick Victorian house with the white lace woodwork that I grew up in and the orchards that came with it would stay with me.

  My parents rented the land from my maternal grandparents, who’d received the house and the orchard from a man who owed them money. The story goes that the man was on his way to debtors’ prison, but since he liked my grandfather, he settled one of his debts with that land. It’s a strange Dickensian kind of story, I know, but anyone who could explain it to me is long gone.

  Orchards were in my mother’s blood; she was descended from seven generations of Niagara landowners, the first of which had settled in the region after families loyal to the British Crown had fled their homes during the American Revolution and received as their reward land grants on what was then British land.

  But it was my father who put his heart into the soil, giving his summers — free from his job as a teacher and, later, high-school principal — to tilling, fertilizing, and harvesting. In the evenings, he would tend his vegetable garden, a patch in among the cherry trees that he’d cleared to grow enough produce to feed our family, not just in the summer months, but until the next seeds could be planted.

  I loved being out in the garden with my father on spring evenings when the golden light stayed strong until my early bedtime, when the only sounds were the barking of dogs and slamming of screen doors in the distance. My father taught me how to use the hoe to gently break up the soil between the rows and how to set the small plants into holes and pat the spring-cold earth around them. As the days grew longer I rushed to the garden after school to feel how the sun had warmed the soil and see how much taller the plants were. In the late summer and fall, I shared my father’s pride in picking the first beans, the first tomatoes, the first squash, and carrying them into the kitchen to my mother. My father didn’t talk much as we worked, but in his companionship in the garden, in his desire to feed us all, I felt his love more than anywhere else.

  Both my parents had expectations of me as a girl born in the fifties. I felt my mother’s more strongly. “Why can’t you be like T?” she’d say, comparing me to a cousin who always looked neat and clean, who smiled and didn’t shy away from talking politely with adults in her sweet voice. In other words, my antithesis. I knew I didn’t want to be like T, but the admonitions always left me wondering what I did want to be. My father never voiced the same concerns as my mother, but neither did he disagree with them. But in the garden, working beside him, none of that mattered. What I became could wait for later.

  On winter evenings, my father passed his time dog-earing pages in the Stokes seed catalogue, circling pictures of some vegetables, crossing out others, and filling out forms. I never saw myself becoming like him in that way. Through my working and parenting years there was simply no time. A quick visit to garden centres for plants was all I could manage. And in retirement, the master plan was never supposed to involve cold Canadian nights waiting for spring. Peter and I planned to find a cheap and warm country each winter where we’d spend our evenings reading about what sights or markets we’d visit the next day.

  But as the early darkness filled our house in the months of Peter’s cancer treatments, when all travel plans were off the books, I finally got that, for my father, imagining the garden, deciding what varieties of vegetables he’d grow, fed his optimism for the future. Helped him through the winter. My father has been dead for more than two decades, but I felt he, like Peter, would be cheering on my project.

  Both my parents came to adulthood in a depression and then started their marriage during a war when my father left teaching to train Royal Air Force pilots how to navigate in planes. As a couple, they knew how to scrimp. The vegetables from my father’s garden that could be frozen were packed away in the freezer; those that could be canned were boiled in Mason jars; those that could sit out the winter were stored in bushel baskets and boxes of sand in a cobwebby, dark, and dank room in the back of the basement. My parents understood sustainability long before the word was cool. I never heard them speak about the concept of the Victory Garden, but they certainly lived by its intent, understood its inspiration.

  And that intent seeped into me. After my father’s death, I started growing vegetables in my small urban garden. For years, I dug with his shovels and supported my tomatoes with his slowly rusting stakes. And for years after my mother’s death, I kept Mason jars filled with her stewed tomatoes, my favourite comfort food of all time. I remember standing next to her at the kitchen sink, peeling tomatoes from my father’s garden and stuffing them into glass jars along with a little salt and onion before she’d set the sealed jars in big blue aluminum pots on the stove. On winter evenings, we’d have a bowl of those tomatoes to start the meal. Even after we all left home, my mother bottled so many tomatoes, all her children had a winter’s supply.

  As I entered the working world, first as a teacher, I looked forward to those tomatoes after a bad day. A few years after my mother’s death, I finally had to open the last jars I’d stored in my basement and dump out the contents, the fear of botulism becoming greater than my desire for nostalgia’s taste. My past was in those jars. I might have the sap of fruit trees in my veins, but my memory muscles have been nurtured by homegrown vegetables.

  Peter also knew that losing myself in the garden was my kind of meditation. I think all gardeners are loners at heart who seek solitude and contemplation by working in the dirt. And just as I knew he needed his alone time with his books, he knew I needed time when nothing else mattered to me but the work I was doing in the garden.

  I put my need for solitude and my ingrained feelings of being a loner down to my earliest summers on the family farm. After my parents took over the care of the land, their summer days were filled with constant trips between the house and the barn, the house and the orchard. I know because I watched them go back and forth. My parents moved to the farm when my siblings were old enough to roam on their own, anywhere they wanted on the property and beyond. My two brothers had the greatest freedom; they explored the escarpment that loomed just across the highway, nearby creeks, and the town of Grimsby. But I was the baby, the youngest by nearly five years, and during our first summers at that house, I was too young to be let loose and my sister not old enough to be entrusted with my care. My parents’ solution wasn’t intended to be cruel. But on a farm and before daycare, their options were limited. My father fenced off the side yard, creating a giant playpen where I could
be left when my mother couldn’t be with me, where I’d be safe from trucks backing up, the tractor turning into the barn with a dray loaded with baskets of peaches, and the strangers who came to pick the fruit or to buy it.

  One of my brothers still likes to tease me about how I spent my time in the pen standing by the gate looking out even though I had a whole yard to play in behind me. I suspect I wasn’t in that pen as often as I imagine and I don’t remember much of my time there. I know I played under a spreading lilac tree in the corner closest to the gate. And I remember digging in the soil beneath the tree while keeping an eye out for movement.

  That’s why I believe my sense of never truly being a part of something came from those summer days. From watching through the gate as others passed by. But, perhaps, I also gained from that time my love of solitude, my need to creep away and feel the dirt on my hands.

  Once I was old enough to be freed, I snuck across the highway to an ice cream stand, with coins plundered from the cash box in the kitchen, and treated friends I was trying to win over. The stand sold vanilla ice cream, prewrapped in paper, and plopped into sugar cones. After we ate our cones, we climbed the escarpment in search of salamanders we could keep in jars. I travelled as far as a young girl in a small town could. But wherever I went, however I spent my free summer days, there’d be a point in the afternoon where I’d have to get to a tree in the orchard or crawl under my bed to be alone. That has stayed with me in my need for places where I can hide out and find resilience in the earth and its seasons.

  As an adult, I became a haphazard gardener. Work, a first failed marriage, single parenthood, and my new family with Peter commanded my time. I had a garden whenever I had a backyard, but it was always a hobby, part of keeping a house looking as Better Homes and Gardens as I could. It was only after my mother died one spring, when I was in my forties, that I truly reconnected with that intense need to sort through my emotions in the act of digging. In the days following her death, I wanted nothing more than to be alone, and I found nowhere better to be alone than on the “reverse ravine” of the home Peter and I had purchased in Toronto.