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.
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