A Victory Garden for Trying Times Read online

  One advantage I had with classmates was the rambling Victorian house we lived in. While I envied their neat suburban homes, they loved to explore my house, run up its curved staircase, or play on its upper veranda. And I liked to serve my house up to them. On the ground floor there was a dining room large enough to hold a table that could easily seat twelve, a long mahogany sideboard, and a tea tray with my mother’s silver tea set. Looking back, I realize it was a grand room, but it was an ordinary one to me since our family ate there every Sunday. But it wasn’t ordinary to the subdivision kids. To all of us, though, the most magnificent object in the room was the crystal chandelier that hung over the table.

  When my parents took on the house after I was born, my father painstakingly restored each room. For years, the house had sat empty, except for two times when my grandfather had lent it to the town. During the Second World War, it served as quarters for farmerettes, as they were called in North America. They were single women who came from the cities to work on farms after the men left for war. Perhaps because of their diminutive name, I grew up thinking the farmerettes who’d lived in our house were all fun-loving teenage girls like Debbie Reynolds or Sandra Dee from the Tammy movies I’d watch on TV. And perhaps because I lived on a fruit farm, I always imagined those girls hanging cherries over their ears or dropping a cherry down the front of their blouses and when it didn’t fall through, saying, like Tammy, “I’m a woman, fully growed.” It was only later, when I read a little history, that I discovered that the British Women’s Land Army, a very earnest organization, started in England and, during both world wars, sent thousands of land girls, single women of all ages, out in breeches and floppy hats to do heavy farm work, including ploughing. As a way of increasing food production, the program complemented the Victory Garden movement in both Great Britain

  and North America.

  After the war, a fire destroyed the old hospital in town and our house become the local hospital for a time. My mother always told me my bedroom had been the nursery, although someone (maybe a brother) made me think it was where people were left to die.

  As part of his renovation, my father had stripped the mahogany stair rail of its hospital green and wallpapered bedrooms and the hallway. And he’d hung that chandelier — the one my friends so admired — with great care. The chandelier had been a belated wedding gift my parents gave each other when their finances improved after the war. It was the most expensive and valued item in their home. To keep it from crashing onto the table, my father had taken up the pine boards in the bedroom above the dining room and bolted the chandelier to the floor joists. That chandelier wasn’t going anywhere.

  One day I was playing in the house with a couple of girls. My father was out in the orchard; my mother was sorting fruit in the barn. One of the girls — probably bossy Ruthy — said it would be fun to get up on one end of the dining-room table, grab the chandelier, and swing to the other end of the table. It was a popular idea, so I went along with it. And the girls seemed to have fun, although I can’t really recall any swings I took. I’ve probably blocked them from my mind because my next memory is of my father coming into the room and yelling. The electrical cord of the chandelier had stretched and the chandelier now hung inches from the table. He yelled some more and said many things, but it was these words I can’t forget: “I will never speak to you.”

  My father never struck me, but that day I wished he had. He was my garden pal. I rode with him to buy seeds and plants for his vegetable garden in the spring. I weeded and harvested with him in the summer. Even though he didn’t talk much while we gardened, the idea he would never speak to me again stung.

  Inexorably tied to the memory of his words was my first taste of beet greens. I sat beside him at the kitchen table that evening. My three older siblings had heard the story by then and were trying not to look too smug over the fact that for once it was the baby in trouble and not them. Dinner that night was the usual summer fare: some kind of cold meat, a turkey platter filled with sliced tomatoes from the garden, potatoes, green beans, and a dish of beet greens. To my father’s surprise, I asked for beet greens. And I knew I had to eat them. I could feel him watching me as I took a forkful of the slimy greens and brought it to my mouth. I chewed them and swallowed. Their slight tartness seemed right for the occasion. I ate all my beet greens that evening and by the end discovered I loved them. I didn’t say as much, but I knew that with each bite I was worming my way back into my father’s heart. I’ve been a committed beet-green eater ever since.

  Broccoli — Yes. I’d wanted to plant some in late summer the previous year for a fall crop but by then I couldn’t find either seeds or plants. Now that I was committed to the idea of successive seed sowing, I wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  Cabbage — Yes. My inspirational Victory Garden map displayed both early and late cabbage. But I would make an adjustment to that. During the summer, there are so many other vegetables I prefer. I’d choose a variety — the name Multikeeper caught my eye — that I could store for the winter, when other fresh-vegetable choices disappeared. In the winter, I like to make a type of cabbage salad I’d discovered through my Russian friend. She grates the cabbage, salts it, and leaves it in a bowl with a weight on it for hours. Then she rinses the salt off the wilted cabbage, grates some carrots in with it, and dresses it with lemon juice and olive oil. I make a big batch of it and eat it for days in a row.

  On and on my mental list grew. Carrots — Yes. Potatoes — No. Corn — No. I’d get both of those from local farmers. Cucumbers — Yes, but not the watery American kind, the Armenian heritage variety I’d spotted in my first catalogue. Eggplant — No, no, no. It’s the one vegetable I despise. Kale — Definitely. My daughter, Jane, had gone through phases as a vegetarian, a vegan, and a juicer. Kale had been an element of all her diets. Lettuce — Yes, with attention to varieties that could cope with some heat so they wouldn’t bolt and grow bitter at the first sign of real summer weather. Leeks — Yes, for Peter’s favourite leek and potato soup, but only from sets. Onions — Yes, the red kind. Peppers — Yes, the red kind. Peas, radishes, and chard — All in. And, of course, zucchini to eat raw and cooked and baked in breads.

  I spent the most time mulling over the last two vegetables: winter squash and tomatoes. Oh, I’d have them, but selecting the varieties would be difficult among all the choices every catalogue displayed.

  Winter squash is one of the last foods that grows in the season and the best vegetable to keep; it stores well in cellars for months and fills the stomach cheaply with a wallop of vitamins. Squash is a food from here, the third vegetable in the Three Sisters trinity, with maize and beans, which has fed dwellers on the American continent for thousands of years. The genus Cucurbita demands time to reach its full, ripe size and space to spread its long vines.

  In his garden, my father experimented with every kind of winter squash available to him: acorn; warty, thick-skinned Hubbard; bulbous butternuts; and orange pumpkins. My mother cooked them all. After my parents bought a deep freeze, they worked together in the kitchen filling tubs with baked squash for freezing. I came to dread Sunday dinners and the scoop of Hubbard squash that my mother plopped on my plate beside three other vegetables before passing the plate to my father for a slice of roasted meat. To refuse the squash was to refuse my parents’ love.

  And when I brought a man home for Sunday dinner, my father slyly watched him pass his plate to my mother for vegetables. A real man could get away with refusing potatoes or cauliflower, but not squash. Never the squash. For the first year of my first marriage, my father often called my husband Lawrence, which wasn’t his name. I suspected it was because my husband refused the squash.

  I would never have the space or need for all the varieties of winter squash my father grew. But I decided I had to have at least one kind to honour him, and it would be a butternut because there are so many ways to prepare it.

  Tomatoes were really the vegetable — or fruit, I should say —
that I wanted most in my garden. The sight of flourishing plants with fat, healthy tomatoes equals garden success to me. I’d been disappointed in my tomatoes the previous year. About the time my zucchini gave up, the leaves on my tomato plants had started to shrivel and turn brown. I knew I’d planted the tomatoes too close together and suspected that a single plant I’d bought at a plant sale had infected the others. As well, I’d made the mistake of growing the small Sweet Million tomatoes from seeds I’d collected. Then I’d learned the bitter truth: you can’t grow hybrid tomatoes from your own seeds. The tiny tomatoes looked perfect but they tasted so awful I had to spit them out.

  I would buy all new seeds for the tomato rows and choose disease-resistant varieties for my sauce and eating tomatoes, and when it came time to draw my rows on a map, I’d make sure to leave enough space for the Romas and Big Beefs I’d selected, so they wouldn’t touch. And on my map, I’d draw the tomato rows where tomatoes hadn’t grown in the past two years. For my pots on the deck, I’d choose cherry and patio tomatoes that promised abundance.

  I have this, I told myself. Peter’s surgery was happening. Recovery and my successful garden would come soon after.

  Chapter Seven

  THE NEXT STEP BEFORE ORDERING my seeds was to draw my maps to see how many vegetables I could fit in my beds. But as we got closer to Peter’s big day, I thought about the garden less often. Then, the weekend before the Monday surgery, I got the first cold I’d had all winter and it knocked me out. I slept in the guest room so I wouldn’t share my germs with Peter. Luckily, Jane was visiting that weekend and brought me cups of tea.

  By the morning of the surgery, I felt stronger. Peter and I were ready to leave by 4:15 a.m. But I didn’t want to leave the house quite that early. St. Joseph’s Hospital was just an hour away, after all. The doors to the surgery’s reception area wouldn’t open until 6:00 a.m., and I didn’t want Peter standing around. Or maybe I wanted to feel in control of something. That was a mistake. The worst snowstorm of the winter descended on us in the predawn hours. Driving on the dark country roads that hadn’t been ploughed and on the highway where dividing lines were invisible was treacherous and slow. I went as fast as I could, but drove with extra care and tried to lighten the tense mood in the car. “It would be a shame if I got us killed on the way to life-saving surgery,” I said, and we both laughed a little at my joke. But that was the only moment of humour on the trip. As time sped up and traffic slowed, our anxiety grew. I didn’t mind the snow so much, but my night vision was not what it had once been, so keeping inside the unmarked lanes took all the concentration I could manage. I tried to ignore the niggling talk in my brain that the weather and the fact we’d be late were signs the surgery wouldn’t go well.

  My unease continued throughout the morning. When we got to the surgery wing, about fifteen minutes late, Peter was pulled ahead of those with numbers who had duly arrived at six on the dot. He had to be prepped for his eight o’clock surgery, so we had to say goodbye too quickly.

  I settled in for the wait, worried I’d start coughing and not be able to stop. I had considered wearing a mask in the waiting room but didn’t, reasoning I was past the contagious stage of my cold. Instead, I sucked on lozenges when I couldn’t hold the coughs in any longer. No one around me seemed concerned; everyone was lost in a private bubble of worry.

  The St. Joseph’s Hospital surgery waiting room was pleasant and modern, with soft colours, big windows, and couches that divided the long space into living room–sized areas. In my “living room,” I sat with an Italian Canadian woman whose husband was getting a new knee, a Peruvian Canadian woman whose husband was losing a kidney, and a young Portuguese Canadian man whose pregnant fiancée was having an ovarian cyst removed. In a matter of minutes, we knew each other’s stories, discussing details that you’d share only with intimate friends or strangers you’d never see again. We sipped from our Tim Hortons cups and watched a computer screen that tracked the progress of our loved ones.

  One by one, surgeons came out and talked to the people in my circle. One by one, each person left to visit their partner in a bed somewhere. I stared at the wall clock and watched the minute hand move past the maximum time of three to four hours we’d been given for Peter’s surgery. On the computer screen, Dr. F’s next patient remained stuck in the “waiting for surgery” box and Peter stuck in surgery.

  Outside, the snow was still falling — slushy stuff now that streaked the grey sky and spat on the windows. I tried to breathe. I tried to meditate, but the panic rose anyway. Jane had offered to take the day off work to be with me, but I knew that meant she’d lose a day’s wages and her government employer didn’t pay her enough as it was. But alone in the circle, I wished I hadn’t persuaded her not to come.

  The Peruvian Canadian woman came back from a walk; her husband was still in recovery and she was waiting to see what room staff would move him to. She had a friend with her and they talked quietly in Spanish. But seeing my distress, the friend asked me for my husband’s name.

  “Peter,” I said, feeling each syllable leave my lips and my throat vibrate with emotion. It felt good to say his name aloud, making him alive and real in the space.

  “We’ll pray for him,” she said.

  It was a long Spanish prayer, unfathomable to me. But I let the words wash over me, felt the kindness of this stranger.

  “Gracias,” I said when she finished.

  “You’re welcome,” she answered.

  After five hours, Dr. F emerged, looking weary. He signalled for me to follow him into a private space. Peter had come through the surgery fine, but the operation had been more difficult than Dr. F had believed it would be. Dr. F is no novice; he’s considered a top-notch thoracic surgeon and works at both the provincial and federal level to promote esophageal cancer awareness. He said that it had been tricky working around Peter’s scar tissue from previous surgeries, and to his surprise, the esophagus had been extremely close to the aorta. He hadn’t been able to see that on the CT scan.

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” I said.

  He took a pen out of his pocket and started drawing on the leg of his scrubs. His pen stopped working and I dug in my purse for another. With it, he drew two lines. He said he had to slice very carefully along the side of the esophagus so he wouldn’t cut the aorta.

  “I don’t know if I got it all,” he said. He then went on to talk about the woodiness of the tumour and how he’d had to burn the thoracic duct shut so it didn’t bleed into the esophagus. That procedure would leave Peter prone to pneumonia. But really, all I heard clearly was “I don’t know if I got it all.” At some level, I knew I was listening to a surgeon’s postgame musings, but as I left him I felt devastated nonetheless.

  It would be a couple of hours before Peter’s next move in the hospital would be posted on the monitor, a few hours before I could see him awake. I had time to eat and make calls. In the cafeteria, most of the food stations were shutting down after the lunch period. At the salad station, the man working behind the counter was packing all the fresh ingredients away in plastic containers. He seemed eager to end his shift, showed no interest in making a salad for a late customer. I stood watching him and wanted to yell, Et tu, Mr. Salad Man? Don’t you know I need my vegetables? Are you purposely trying to fuck up my fucked-up day?

  Instead, I wandered around the cafeteria looking for something I could eat, something that would fill the emptiness in my stomach but make me feel good about what I was putting there. Something with vegetables. Over at the grill, which was still open, people were lined up for burgers and fries. The station was clearly popular enough to remain open all day. I stood at the end of the line, wavering. Tempted. Fries were my failing. I could eat them anytime. But I knew I needed something fresh to get rid of the foul taste that had built up in my mouth from fear and cold coffee.

  I circled the cafeteria again and settled finally on a slice of a vegetarian pizza that sat on a raised platter under a
heat lamp. The slice was salty and greasy. I ate it too fast. The heaviness in my stomach left me feeling angry with myself. And more disappointed in the day.

  After lunch and my calls, I found Peter in a bed in the surgical intensive care unit. He had tubes attached to machines all over his body. One tube snaked out of his nose. Since there was no food going into him, they had to draw the bile still being produced for digestion out of him. My undigested pizza felt like a lump in my stomach.

  That evening, when Peter was awake, Dr. F came back. “Everything went fine,” he said.

  Before I could think of the effect of my words on Peter, I blurted out, “But you said you didn’t get it all.”

  “Oh, I got it all,” he answered. “I was just being paranoid.”

  I didn’t know which version of the man to believe, the worn-out surgeon postsurgery or the one trying to reassure a patient with cuts and tubes everywhere.

  Peter was one of the best communicators I knew. He liked to talk to all sorts of people and to email family and colleagues links to articles of interest to them, and was known on Facebook for his many thoughtful, sometimes silly, and often personal postings, which earned him hundreds of followers. As well as The Third Phase blog we took turns writing, he’d started a blog with the title of his memoir, The Man Who Learned to Walk Three Times. In the blog, he’d written about polio and mobility issues until he received his cancer diagnosis and began to record his thoughts about his treatments.

  But in his days in the surgical intensive care ward, Peter didn’t have the energy or the interest to reach out to anyone. And I was feeling too anxious to continue keeping friends and relatives up to date, which prompted some to send me angry emails. Peter was annoyed on my behalf, but I didn’t want him to have to respond to those he felt were being unfair to me. We agreed I’d send a quick mass email and post something on Facebook. On February twentieth, four days after Peter’s surgery, I posted the following on his page: “The doctors are pleased with Peter Kavanagh’s recovery after surgery. He’s feeling positive but still too tired and encumbered with tubes to write that next post. But he will. Soon. Thanks for all the support we’ve received.”