It is April 6th. The air is a bit chilly this morning. Routinely at night it descends close to frost, 34 or so. Inside the houses where the furnace still switches on as if it's Winter, the gardeners are itchy.
Groceries and farmer's markets are pushing us ever forward to plant now. Offering plants that obviously need homes, a nice place to spread their roots. Yet it's too early. Don't put that basil out! if you must, a bed of pansies. Otherwise, you're simply tossing money into the gaping maw of late season cold.
A few years ago, March in Indiana was unusually warm. Beginning at the month's start, it was in the 70's each day, even with the rain. At night, it didn't decline much south of the 50's. And we all fell for it--in went the rows of lettuce, wildflowers were sown, beds of annuals that animated the dreams of Christmas were realized. There were holdouts--people like my parents who married in late May in Northern Indiana in 1945, a year when they woke up on their wedding day to frost. They would no more put a plant in the ground before Memorial Day than fly to the moon. Never!
They were right that year. All that early planting in March's balminess was killed by a colder than normal April, and what plant managed to limp through successive cold nights was innundated in May by rains that were close to daily and epic. After the lick of a long season, we were treated to a growing season made cruel by the weird gyrations of the prevailing currents, the jet stream, the whimsy of a universe with a sense of humor.
I'm going out later today with the shovel to begin to revive beds that Charles had no time to work on when I was gone. My shade garden in the back is a mess of wild blackberries and these peculiarly ugly bushes that characterize underbrush in Southern Indiana. Most of what I've placed back there has been choked out by violets, the hostas and ferns being too tamed to compete. This bed took the place of mossy bare ground that suffered under the spread of a maple and a dogwood, so the plan to encourage growth here worked beautifully--just not necessarily growth I wanted.
I've had a lot of growth I don't want in the past several years, gardens both external and internal. The wild pattern my cancer has taken, the aggressive and barely contained way it has spread has its direct correlative outside. I have been advised to spade at myself in the like manner I'm going after the back yard today. To see myself as a warrior with a spear, a gardener with a shovel, and cancer like a violet bloom where one was never wanted.
I have no disagreement with visualization and self empowerment; all I can see into it is a beautiful outcome of optimism and righteousness. I shall not simply be a victim.
As I go out, though, I wonder if my visualization can forgive the reality that I'm physically weak. That I can spade a small patch and need to rest, and plan for the next small patch I spade. A few years back, in those warm Marchs or Aprils, I could and did spend hours prepping my beds. I could say within one or two weekends that I was ready for the season. Now, I see this procss stretching into June, a square foot at a time.
I've grown old before my time because of cancer. I watch how I walk, I can feel an increasing unsteadiness that comes from being a lot more sedentary. I can feel that exertion is not as welcome, that the guy who loved push ups is not the guy who finds the shovel surprisingly heavy. The impatient gardener has to become the one who plants on successive days, without the oomph it takes to place plants in three large beds and still has the juice to start digging out a fourth.
Judged against the possibility of being dead, this is not the biggest problem in the world, right? Yet when you're measuring the diminution of your life, please tell me that seeing the tape measure decline across the board isn't a bit depressing. That it takes over the mind to see that everything declines, and not in measure with one's years, but in the quick dunking a cancer-chewed life takes.
I have been told and have swallowed the fact that I'll never be cancer-free. I won't have one of those miracle remissions where I go back to normal. At best, doctors tell me that I could hope to work against cancer like a chronic condition that does not kill me but doesn't allow me a long leash to escape its kiss.
Well, it's not death. It's not hopelessness. Let's call it undergrowth, ugly bushes and those frigging violets--let's say it's the constant fight against grass up against my Lamb's Ear border. I just have to pace myself to fight it, knowing I can't--in a day's time--solve any of the problems it dumps on my doorstep or completely stop the choking it gives to my perennials. I am about to begin spading. I'll be doing that every day for the rest of my life.
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