Memory Stones

Memorial weekend. As a child, this was opening weekend for all things camping.  Mom would do a lot of work to get everything ready -- especially when it came to buying and organizing the food as well as packing everyone's clothes.  Dad would load our station wagon with the tent, sleeping bags, water containers, portable stove and general camping equipment.  And off we'd go, all seven of us, crammed into that blue station wagon headed to a remote part of the mountains.  We'd wake early, go fishing, take an afternoon nap by the stream, sit around the campfire at night and toast marshmallows.  Who knew time would go by so quickly.

After we all grew up and had families of our own we eventually stopped camping as one big, united clan and instead, devoted the summer holiday periods to our own children and spouses.  Each Memorial weekend, I would choose to garden.  It was my time to nurture life back into a newly thawed and hopeful season.  Even so, we'd all get together at Mom's and Dad's, and barbecue hamburgers and hot dogs (veggie burgers for me) on Memorial Day.  Now Mom's gone and I'm a bit upside down this year.

And then, too, there is the garden itself, a true mess, the last few years being left to Darwinian ways.  Proving that tangled, snarled growth of the unwelcome kind happens when we don't pay attention.

This year, I'm back digging in the dirt, pruning, pulling, and planting.  And I'm adding new memory stones.

First, Mike and I decided it was time to create a final resting place for Patches and Rafiki, whose ashes sat too long in pet containers on our bookcase.  We bought a beautiful new bush, dug a deep hole, mingled their ashes together, and tried to say a little prayer as we laid them to rest, but instead the best we could do is tell some funny stories about their kitten to elderly years.  We both cried.

Patches' memory stone says, "A good cat," because that is what son Michael said when we told him she had passed.  She was, after all, Michael's cat.  Rafiki's memory stone says, "Our gray shadow," because she shadowed husband Mike everywhere, tripping him up at his feet and living for him to walk through the door each night.  How is it we can miss these cats so much?  We have Genny's cats now, of course, and they are rambunctious, quite destructive and overly energetic -- we had become too accustomed to our geriatric pets.  I'm sure when the day comes we'll cry as we place memory stones for Zabba and Hopey into the garden.

Next it was time to re-honor the ancestors.  My great-grandmothers both had an abundance of Hollyhocks in their gardens, and  I remember as a child I loved it when they would pluck off the flowers and make me Hollyhock dolls.  I had Hollyhocks in this current garden too and use to make Holloyhock dolls for my granddaughter Hannah, but the neglected plants died out the past two years, so I planted fresh new seeds and now watch and wait and remember . . .

On February 20, 2011, my best friend of nearly 30 years died on Genny's birthday, after a three year battle with brain cancer.  I don't know why the last few years have been a journey into cancer territory (Carol with brain cancer, Mom with breast cancer, Genny with blood cancer).  But I'll use Carol's own words here, "It is what it is."  In the autumn of 2010, Carol was starting to slip and we knew the time was coming when the experimental treatment program she was on would quit working.  That fall, she dug up a black-eyed susan plant from her front yard and gave it to me.  I cried when she placed it into my hand, dirt clumps dry and cold around the broken roots.  Brain cancer may have stripped Carol from communicating complex thoughts, but I knew exactly what she was doing.  She was giving me a memory keeper.  And even though it was late in the season, I transferred her black-eyed susan plant into my front garden where it would receive the best sunlight, hoping that it would come back the following year.  Carol passed and the black-eyed susan never reappeared.  I'm starting from seed, letting Carol know I'm holding onto the memory.

Last but not least, well I wanted to find a way to remember Mom in the garden this year.  She wasn't a rose-type gal even if each wedding anniversary Dad did buy the exact number of roses that represented every year they were married  (use to upset Mom that Dad would spend that kind of money -- she was ever the pragmatist and would have preferred using those funds to pay for an item the family needed).  Yep, Mom was a carnation gal.  She appreciated the beauty of a cheap, inexpensive flower that needed little tending and which would live for weeks in a vase of tap water.

So I planted carnation seeds around St. Francis and hope Mom's spirit will bring them to bloom.  

And now I do what we gardeners must do.  Wait.  And the memory stones mark the way.

Manure is good

It's Friday, May 17, 2013, and I'm sitting on my patio feeling a light mist as the gray-smeared clouds threaten to unleash their bloated bellies.  I'm looking at my recently tilled garden, not wanting to go inside even as raindrops are starting to make their presence known on my laptop screen.  I've spent too much time inside these past two years.  I can't seem to breathe in the smell of newly seeded earth enough.

A few days ago I started writing in my old, manual garden journal -- a journal I've kept for nearly 10 years.  It's been awhile since I cracked open that binder.  It's been awhile since I've actually gardened.

On Weds morning I received a call from the Chairman of the Board of the company where I've been employed the past three years.  He informed me the company was out of cash, no one would receive their pay for the past 15 days worked (or incurred expenses either) and that the company was shutting down.  Well, that's a lot of crap, I tell you.  Seemed the best thing to do after I hung up the phone was to drag the bag of steer manure out of the garage and get going in the garden.  So that's exactly what I did.

And so it begins.  After a two year absence from gardening, I'm back.  Genny's cancer journey -- the daily care of my very sick child and the deeply entrenched fear of loosing her -- is seen in the weeds and grass that have overtaken both my flower beds and the potager kitchen garden.  A metaphor for the terror that took root in my soul in those early days of her diagnosis.  And an obvious sign of neglect for all things non-cancer related.  Then came transplant -- Genny's that is -- and I'm sure there's another metaphor there as well which I'm too exhausted to explore in tonight's writing.  With transplant came extreme caregiving, a role I cherished because it meant my daughter survived.  Too many others did not.  Too many that we came to know in our tight-knit cancer community.  Too many that we loved and lost.

Which leads me back to gardening.  I come to the garden because it is a microcosm of life.  The garden is just as terrifying for those who live there as the larger world is to us humans.  The earthworm, so vital for aeration, is in a moment snapped up by a red-breasted robin.  I mean, who doesn't love robins?  How many people really love the earth worm?   When the aphids come, and no doubt they will, they too will need to defend themselves against lady bugs.  Well I hate aphids so I'm okay with that devouring.  Tennyson said it best, "Nature red in tooth and claw."  So why, then, am I drawn into a world that is just as bloody and violent as the human world?  I suppose it is because I am somewhat selective in what I choose to see in the garden.  After spreading manure two days ago (yes, shit is important to organic gardening and it does remind me, too, that poop has a very important role in the stem cell transplant world -- diarrhea being a sign of that the dreaded GVH disease has taken hold, but gosh,  I do digress!).  Anyway, after spreading manure and compost and tilling the garden using nothing but a hoe and my own atrophied muscles, muscles that went soft from sitting in hard reclining chairs in hospital rooms the past two years, I planted seeds.  My Day Zero  -- known in the transplant world as the day the patient receives the life-saving stem cells of her hero donor -- my Day Zero is the day I planted cilantro, dill, fenugreek, basil, rosemary, parsely, oregano, chamomile and tarragon.    And now I anxiously await for Day Plus 7 - 10 when these new little babies will slowly start to pop their heads above the earth.  I can't wait to greet my herb children.

In the garden, I am renewed.  I get to leave the War on Terrorism, bombings that take innocent lives, news about children who are kidnapped and brutally treated or murdered.  The garden is an exit, also, from the egotistical corporate world, however brief.  In the garden, I am neither the hunter nor the hunted.  It is here I am the caretaker, nurturing new born life into the world, pulling weeds that threaten to choke health and vibrancy.  Weeds that remind me of cancer.  And while I don't use chemo's equivalent in the microcosmic world of the garden; i.e., chemical pesticides, I do get down on my hands knees, just as I have done in praying for Genny, and I dig and pull and dig some more and pull some more.  Sometimes the root goes too deep, and the weed will grow back.  But I will never quit pulling. Never.