A Victory Garden for Trying Times Read online

Bird by bird, I told myself.

  Before the month of January ended, I would measure the space for the Victory Garden. In February, I would plot my map and decide what I’d grow in my beds. And then spring would not be far off once the days started getting longer. And I’d get started. I would follow the inspiration of my father, who used the rhythm of the garden season, the miracle of seeds, the abundance of crops to carry him forward.

  Chapter Five

  BY THE LAST DAY OF JANUARY that year, I still had not measured my two vegetable beds, although I had no excuse. I certainly had the free time, and the weather was with me. The month ended with temperatures usually granted to us in northern climes early in the spring. The sun, with surprising heat to it, urged me to get out in the yard and get the job done.

  I knew my two patches would not come close to the twenty-five-by-fifty-foot garden carefully plotted on the Second World War Victory Garden map I’d chosen as my example. That would be 1,250 square feet, the size of a bungalow. Bigger than most city apartments.

  My problem: how to get an accurate measurement with two beds that were not even shapes. Modern surveyors can precisely measure the area of any space by using skills in geometry, engineering, and physics and with tools like infrared refractors and something called a robotic total station. The RTS, I learned, is a modern piece of surveying equipment that allows one surveyor to measure with remote controls — modern, I suppose, in its use of robotics and in eliminating jobs.

  I possessed none of these things, neither the skills nor the equipment. I’d have to rely on the time-tested method of measuring a farmer’s irregular field. It involves dividing the field into triangles or other measurable shapes, figuring out the area of each shape, and then adding them all together. Math skills have never been my strong suit but I thought I could manage this puzzle.

  Wearing a pair of old running shoes that squished in the muddy earth and armed with a measuring tape, paper, and pencil, I set out, feeling like I was finally beginning something. Like I was shaking off the month’s inaction. Being on hold, not knowing what would come next in Peter’s care had raised our anxiety to heights we hadn’t felt since we first received the diagnosis. When we had been driving back and forth to Hamilton for treatments, we felt, at least, a sense we were doing something to beat back the cancer. This waiting left me feeling languid and helpless. Like I was touching a wire with a low current that ran continuously through me. It was no wonder I kept hearing, in my head, the Leonard Cohen song “Bird on the Wire.”

  But by the last day of January, we felt we were at the edge of something happening. In early February, we would start to get some answers again. And I knew that once I had my measurements, I could get on with all the other steps. Peter and I were both organizers, planners, by inclination and profession; we both desperately needed a schedule and an outcome.

  That morning, cloaked in just a light spring jacket, I measured the bigger plot first, the one I’d used the previous summer. It was basically a rectangle with two pear trees I’d planted in corners. Eventually, those trees would grow, provide shade, and decrease the size of the vegetable garden, but not that year, not the year of my Victory Garden. I stood in the yard without a sound around me except the caw of a crow in a tree nearby that seemed perturbed a human would enter its space in winter. I tsked at it while I measured the garden in squares and triangles. I wrote the numbers on my paper, multiplied, and came up with a measurement of basically twenty-two feet by twenty feet. Only 440 square feet.

  The other, smaller bed was trickier to measure. It was shaped like a boat, with curving lines and narrow ends. I had dug out a mass of sedum that had filled the bed, given the bed some compost and manure, and used one end of it for my garlic in the fall. In that end stood our garden’s most magnificent tree, a columnar flowering dogwood that had been completely covered in blossoms from May to July the previous year. In the centre of the bed, I’d planted a garden-size Stella cherry and at the far end a Montmorency sour cherry. They, too, would command much of the sun within a few years. If I still wanted a Victory Garden then, I’d have to come up with another vegetable bed. But the ifs were elusive and daunting. If I was still gardening. If we were still in this house. IF. I tried not to think about them. Filed the doubts away.

  For the smaller bed, I worked with the average width of 5 feet and the length of 22 feet to come up with a size of approximately 110 square feet for my allium — I would plant red onions and leeks in among the garlic already in the ground — and my Cucurbita varieties (summer and winter squash), which I would plant at the other end.

  All in all, I had 550 square feet for vegetables, less than half of my model map. To put it in metric terms, I had 51 square metres as opposed to the 116 square metres of the Victory Garden I’d found on the internet. But that was okay. I had a separate bed for herbs, a small patch with rhubarb, and another for berry canes. As well, I’d planted spreading strawberries to run through a flower bed and three native pawpaw trees, which would bear their papaya-like fruit in a few years. We were not a family of five trying to get through a year of war scarcity. We were two people and would have more than enough from our beds, with plenty to spare for Jane and neighbours. And if the zombie apocalypse did come, I could churn up more lawn another year.

  With the measuring finished, the next step was filling in my maps with rows so I would finally see how many varieties of vegetables I could plant and could decide what seeds to order. But before I got around to that we got caught up again in Peter’s treatment. Peter received word his CT scan would happen on February fifth and the follow-up appointment with the surgeon on February sixteenth. Surgery, if it happened, could be as far away as a month after that.

  About that time, two glossy catalogues appeared in my mailbox. I decided to set them aside, thinking they’d be a good way to wile away the time in February, with its second round of waiting. But before I did, I flipped through the pages and admired the bright greens, oranges, and reds that screamed out flavour and nutrients, that made me feel real excitement about the potential of those beds I’d measured.

  It also didn’t escape me during that time that my obsession with a project involving healthy vegetables was linked to my worries about Peter and food. With his swallowing problems, he found it a relentless chore to take in enough nourishment.

  Getting food into patients is a major concern for any medical staff treating esophageal cancer. When we had finally landed at the Juravinski Cancer Centre in Hamilton in November, one of the first questions the brilliant radiologist Dr. S asked Peter was “Are you eating?” Dr. S is one of the leading specialists in a treatment called brachytherapy; the Juravinski was the only cancer centre in Canada then where patients could receive it. While the treatment can’t kill the cancer, it can reduce the tumour’s size enough so that food can make it to the stomach more easily, meaning patients can eat to keep up strength and endure their treatments.

  Even before the oncology team prescribed the regime of radiation blasts and supporting chemo sessions, Dr. S gave Peter three brachytherapy sessions. Essentially, in brachytherapy, a pellet of radioactive material is sent down the esophagus in a tube to sit directly by the tumour, where it is left for a few minutes.

  While waiting with Peter as he was prepped each time for the procedure, I could hear Dr. S through the curtains surrounding Peter’s bed scolding patients who weren’t eating. One man, whom I later saw was rail thin, told Dr. S that, although he hadn’t eaten anything that day, he had drunk four bottles of Ensure. We had just begun buying the nutritional supplement to get enough calories into Peter, but he was loath to rely on it. We heard other patients complain that food just didn’t taste good anymore so they’d stopped eating. Dr. S told patients that the cancer cells were suppressing their appetite. Those nasty buggers, I thought. Dr. S warned patients lying in beds beyond the curtains that if they didn’t keep eating, he’d have to insert a feeding tube to get the nutrition and calories they needed into their bodies. Those were fig
hting words to Peter; he said he’d do anything to avoid a feeding tube, and he was a stubborn enough man to stick to his word. He continued eating when it was the last thing he wanted to do.

  Before the radiation started in earnest, Dr. S warned Peter that he would have to maintain his body weight even though his swallowing would become worse before it got better. Everyone on the team at the Juravinski Centre advised Peter to eat lots of calories, protein, and fat. And they didn’t want him to build up his immune system when he was going through treatments that were purposely intended to suppress it while killing the cancerous cells.

  When the dietitian on the team recommended that Peter not bother with vegetables during this stage of his treatment, I was horrified. I grew up believing everyone needs four servings of vegetables a day, because that’s what my mother put in front of me most evenings. I could just as easily chomp on radishes and celery than cheese. Peter never shared my fondness for raw vegetables or for the array of vegetables I love, so that request didn’t bother him as much as it did me.

  But he was alarmed when the dietitian wrote down the number of calories and the amount of protein he would need to include in his diet to deal with the added stress on his body the treatments would cause: 2,500 to 3,000 calories a day, more than the recommended amount for a man his age. And 125 to 300 grams of protein a day, for a man who didn’t eat much meat. All at a time when he had no appetite.

  In the days leading up to his first radiation treatment, Peter had what they call a planning CT. During the procedure, a young man tattooed permanent points onto Peter’s body where the radiation needed to enter to reach the cancer cells. The technician warned us that if Peter lost 10 percent of his body mass, the target points would no longer match up to the right areas. I pictured a bull’s eye and misaimed arrows.

  That meant Peter had to force himself to eat, like a duck making foie gras — although he took the role of both duck and enforcer. We had to come up with calorie-rich foods that could go down easily: blended legume and vegetable soups, macaroni and cheese, ice cream, meat lasagna, and smoothies. For some reason Peter could eat poached eggs but not scrambled. Each morning I made a smoothie of whey powder, Greek yogurt, fruit, and, with the permission of the dietitian, powdered greens.

  During the treatments, Peter’s swallowing did become worse. Not only was the shrinking tumour still in his esophagus blocking the passage of food, the esophagus itself became raw and more painful after each radiation session. We never ate out and Peter wouldn’t eat in front of anyone but me and Jane because each bite came with a potential coughing jag that could last twenty minutes, making him feel he would regurgitate everything he ate. He never did and, through sheer willpower, he managed to keep his weight steady.

  Because of his difficulties with eating and his need to keep away from anyone ill, we begged off all Christmas parties and family dinners. I baked the lasagna Jane, Peter, and I liked to eat for Christmas Eve and we made a relatively traditional Christmas dinner. For the few times we’d had Christmas in our own home in the past, Peter had loved to roast the turkey, prepare a big dish of stuffing, and mash his smooth potatoes. He always prepared his potatoes even when we visited someone in my family for Christmas dinner; everyone loved his mashed potatoes.

  Jane and I ate heartily at both meals that year, but Peter took small servings of the dishes and took his time with each bite. He couldn’t taste the flavours the way he had in the past. There was no smacking of his lips, no second helpings. For him, though, the Christmastime meals were made special by the doctor’s permission to have a glass of white wine with each one.

  Through it all, I ate and ate. Oh, there were vegetables and healthy foods. But there were also second and third helpings I didn’t need but took anyway as I watched in distress as Peter struggled with each forkful of food. If it had been summer, I would have stood in the garden eating raw beans and tomatoes, pulling up carrots and radishes, picking at the kale and lettuce. But it was winter and I ate too much pasta, potatoes, and chocolate.

  After the treatments, the doctors had told us we’d have to wait weeks for the CT scan and the surgery, until some of the rawness and swelling in the esophagus healed. But sometimes I think doctors give explanations that suit their schedule. On the fourth of February, Peter received a call from the surgeon’s office at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Hamilton moving the CT scan up to that day. We’d also been told it would take a few days to process the information from the scan into a report. But suddenly those days were apparently unnecessary. Within an hour, Peter received a second call advising him to see the surgeon, Dr. F, right after the CT. Dr. F could read the CT scan himself.

  With the scan done, we sat in the clinic’s waiting room to see the doctor, neither of us voicing our fears or hopes. I closed my iPad Mah-Jong game that had got me through so much waiting and pulled out the two glossy seed catalogues I’d set aside. We talked quietly about the garden we’d sit in that summer. We’d limit the basil varieties in the herb bed to Thai and Genovese; neither of us had found last year’s African or purple basil particularly tasty. I’d try tomatoes in pots, as well as in the garden, so we could easily grab them and enjoy their colour while we dined on the deck. We flipped pages and ignored other patients who rose to meet their doctors. We both knew we were distracting ourselves — but it was calming nonetheless. The vegetables were nurturing us even before the seeds were ordered and germinated.

  After the waiting, everything moved as quickly as lettuce bolting in a sudden heat wave. Dr. F would do the surgery in ten days, not in a month’s time. The CT showed the cancer had not spread, it was no longer in the lymph system, and radiation had reduced the tumour enough that it could be cut out. I raised the issue of the time needed for healing, but Dr. F said the date of surgery was within the protocol.

  We left dazed but relieved. We had much to do before the surgery. Food remained the top priority. Peter had to maintain his weight and muscle mass so he’d be able to recover from what Dr. F called “routine but complicated surgery.” Peter would lose the cancerous section of the esophagus and the remaining portion down to the stomach. Dr. F would then pull up the stomach to meet what was left of the esophagus. In the hospital, Peter would not be able to take anything orally, even chips of ice, for seven days after surgery to keep the internal stitches dry enough to heal. I suppose the team had told us this at our first meeting, but we’d shelved our worries then. Now, we realized how drastically the surgery would change Peter’s life. Forever after, he would have to eat differently, never taking too much food at one time into a stomach that would be reduced in size by more than half. Suddenly, my Victory Garden seemed big enough.

  Chapter Six

  IN THE WEEK LEADING UP TO Peter’s surgery, I tried to keep the garden alive in my mind, keep hope bouncing through my body. I skimmed through the catalogues, compared varieties, and circled seeds.

  Although I’ve long been aware of the persuasive powers of good advertising and its clever copy, I wasn’t immune to it. A zucchini in the Ontario Seed Company catalogue with the boring name of Dark Green was described as bearing “enough dark fruits to feed the nation.” I circled it and underlined that key phrase. The zucchini seedlings I’d planted the previous year had overwhelmed us with produce. We’d eaten the small zucchini in stir-fries or grated and sautéed with olive oil and garlic, the larger ones in stews and baked breads, and the flowers fried in batter. But I still hadn’t avoided waste. Some overgrown zucchinis rotted on the vine until blight brought a premature end to the plants’ productivity. We vowed to use all the zucchini produced in the coming summer; the zucchini breads we’d stuck in the freezer had proven easy to bring out for overnight guests, and we could bake more.

  Often, it was other, less clever phrases in the catalogue like “a good keeper,” “quick maturity,” or “frost tolerance” that caught my attention and influenced my choices.

  Long before I took pen to paper, I’d formed in my mind a preliminary list of the vegetables
I’d choose or reject. It went like this: Asparagus — No. Although I love their grassy flavour, I knew I didn’t have space for enough plants to get a worthwhile crop. Besides, my father’s failure with them scared me off. In our orchard, between rows of trees, he had created a second vegetable bed just for asparagus. Even though he’d have to wait years for tops worth eating, he tried planting them twice. Unfortunately, both times, when he rushed out to get at his cultivating the following spring, he forgot about his new beds and churned them up. After the second time, he never tried asparagus again.

  Beans — Yes. I’d stick to my Kentucky Wonder bean seeds and I’d try a new bush bean, either something called Blue Lake, a customer favourite in the Stokes catalogue, or Ontario Seed Company’s Jade II, described as having “traditional bean flavour” and “excellent disease resistance to common virus!”

  Beets — Yes. Yes. Yes. Each time I bite into a beet I feel like my blood is getting richer. And I’m not wrong. Packed inside each beet, along with vitamin C, folate, and potassium, is the nutrient betaine, which supports the cardiovascular system. I love the earthy taste of beets cold or hot, boiled or roasted, in soups, in salads, or alone sliced on a plate with a drizzling of butter. Peter didn’t like them much, although he’d eat clear borscht. So I’d be growing them mostly for myself and for the greens, which have a tangy taste that can stand alone or hold up in a stir-fry or pasta sauce.

  I haven’t always liked beet greens. As a child I was a picky eater and decided I didn’t like beet greens even though I had never tasted them. My mother would take the leaves my father brought from his garden, boil them, and make them shine with butter, but they never tempted me. That changed, and now each time I eat beet greens they come with a side of memory.

  My social skills, such as they are, came later in life. In public school, I never could figure out how to go about winning the friendship of another child or how far I should go to appease a bully. I tried to be a pleaser, and when that didn’t work, I would simply retreat to my quiet spot alone.