Losing the Gardener

Last spring, after it started turning warm, a final freeze was forecast for the night.  Will and I had just gone to bed when he got up.  I thought he was headed to the bathroom.  Then I heard the hall closet open and close.

I got up to find out what was going on.  I went into the living room and saw him carrying a sheet toward the deck.  "Sweetheart?  What are you doing?"

"I have to cover the tomatoes."

"Sweetie -- you didn't plant any tomatoes this spring."

And we went back to bed.  He didn't remember the incident the next day.

*  *  *

He was the gardener.  All our lives together until this last spring he has grown something.  A year or two after we first married, I pulled up a plot of grass in our yard in Pocatello and every summer after that we grew corn, tomatoes, basil, and lettuces.  He also enjoyed flowers, though not as much as he liked planting things to eat. I can't eat store-bought corn on the cob anymore because of my memory of the tender sweetness of corn pulled right off the stalk.

When we got to Bend, he tended the flowers in our large back yard and on the side of the house.  Just a few days ago, while going through a sack of old photo envelopes, I ran across pictures of some of his carefully tended blooms.

 Now our backyard is wild and full of grass.  He gradually stopped doing any tending of things.  I've tried picking up the slack.  Two summers ago I even bought a couple of hundred dollars worth of of  flowering plants that died after a year.   I don't have the gardener's gift of patience and familiarity with growing things.  I'm not interested in the kind of work it takes to keep a yard nice -- nor will I use any poisons outside the house (except the occasional ant traps).  What we've lost in color and control, however, we've gained in deer poop.  I also don't worry anymore about what the deer will eat -- they can have all of it.

Even last spring he managed to tend a couple of tomato plants on the deck which produced a few hard skinned small "Early Girls".  But this year he didn't seem to want to pick up any tomatoes.  He has, however, been keeping the houseplants watered. 

The wildness of our yard is a daily reminder that I can't cope with this large space without my partner.  I feel sad about how wild our yard is and I pretend that it's a chosen aesthetic rather than the result of his illness.

I suppose that, should he precede me in death and I sell the house, I'll spend money to get the yard looking pretty again.  Until then, I am purchasing decorative animals to inhabit the space along with those that actually use it.