Mister Owita's Guide to Gardening: How I Learned the Unexpected Joy of a Green Thumb and an Open Heart
Authors: Carol Wall
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Copyright © 2014 by Carol Wall
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wall, Carol, date.
Mister Owita’s guide to gardening : how I learned the unexpected joy
of a green thumb and an open heart/Carol Wall.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-698-15098-0
1. Gardening—Philosophy. 2. Intercultural communication. I. Title.
SB454.3.P45W35 2014 2013036314
635—dc23
Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.
Version_1
To my husband, Dick
2. Of Particular Beauty Are the Azaleas
7. The Canopy of the Yukon Gold Potato
8. Every Yard Must Have Its Flowers
10. The Perfect Christmas Tree
14. Potted Plants and Fresh Flowers
I
never liked getting my hands dirty. This was one reason that our yard looked so sad. But there were other reasons, too—bigger reasons that were much harder to confront than brittle grass and overgrown bushes.
It’s not that I was ignoring our yard on purpose. Every once in a while we hired someone to plant or trim something. My husband, Dick, did his share of mowing. But he never did it happily. We weren’t yard-proud the way some people are. And when the kids were young, there was always something more important than yard work to do. Going to one of their games or events, running them to school and lessons, or shepherding them to doctor appointments—all those things ranked way higher on our list of priorities.
Once the kids were grown, I still managed to find more important things to do. I much preferred reading a book, or watching a documentary on TV, or going out to dinner with Dick to pruning a bush. I loved our house, and I enjoyed decorating the inside, but there was never anything about
maintaining
a house that I enjoyed. In some couples, one spouse makes up for the flaws of the other. But for better or worse, my beloved spouse and I shared the same flaw in this department. Neither of us was handy. We ignored our loose front doorknob until it went from shaky to wobbly and finally fell off when we tried to exit the house one evening. Dick watched it fall to the hardwood floor with a thunk, then looked at me and said, “Time to move.”
I don’t think we were entirely wrong in holding on to our low-intervention policy. Once when Dick and I were walking through town, we were stopped by a group of young women who were celebrating their friend’s upcoming wedding. They were asking all the obviously married women they saw for advice for the new bride. I said, “You know, my life really began when I got married.” They all laughed and told me that I was the first woman they’d stopped who hadn’t said, “Don’t do it.” Then I told them that my best advice was not to approach marriage like it was an arrangement between property co-owners. It seemed to me like too many people spent too much of their time taking care of their houses instead of enjoying their spouses. And where was the fun in that?
I liked to think that it was a valid philosophy of life that kept me out of the yard, and not just sheer laziness. In any case, to
me, even worse than digging out a screwdriver to fix our doorknob would have been digging in the dirt. I had zero interest in that area of our property. I don’t think I even really looked at it.
Then one day, I noticed that our yard had slowly, gradually transformed itself. No longer could I flatter myself that it was natural and unmanicured because that was the aesthetic I preferred. No, our yard wasn’t just rough around the edges. It had become a genuine embarrassment. Maybe we didn’t have the worst yard on the block. But we were close to it, and one good mowing in our most neglectful neighbor’s yard might easily nudge us into the bottom slot. And that just wouldn’t do. I might never have been yard-proud, but I did not want to be yard-ashamed.
So I decided that it was time to do something about this situation. It was a fixable problem, after all—and how nice it was to have one of those.
When I passed our neighbor Sarah’s yard I couldn’t help seeing what an amazing job her gardener had done. Sarah was a master gardener herself, but recently she’d gotten busy at work and had brought in some help. And even I could tell that a true artist was at work there. Maybe I could hire her gardener, I thought to myself. And then our yard would be as beautiful as hers. It would be healthy and lush and well taken care of—just the way I wanted to be myself.
A few days later I saw the mystery gardener in the flesh—the artist who’d wrought such a miracle transformation in my neighbor’s yard—and it was kismet. Love at first sight. No, it wasn’t
the kind of love that causes you to question your marriage. It was the kind of love that causes you to question yourself. The kind that makes you want to be a better person. The kind that changes your life completely.
His name was Giles Owita, and from the start, something flowered between us and around us. First he became my gardener, and then he became my friend. And while I knew from the moment I met him that he was someone special—truly, I didn’t know the half of it.
Garden Angel
T
he well-tended yard and stately home of my neighbor Sarah Driscoll, Master Gardener, slipped by on my right. I was so arrested by the view that, for an instant, it felt as if I were standing still and her forty-foot magnolia tree were moving backward.
Then I saw him.
He wore a navy work suit with bright white leather tennis shoes. Our eyes met briefly and my foot went to the brake. Just as fast as that.
By then he’d already turned away from me. I watched as he plunged his shovel into a mound of mulch that wasn’t there when I had left home that morning. He gingerly eased the shovel out and balanced a small pyramid of shredded hardwood with what appeared to be a practiced hand. His build was slight and strong.
I knew that Sarah’s new gardener also worked with her at the Garden Shoppe, where she was assistant manager. She’d said he was industrious and talented. As I continued down the hill and pulled into my driveway, I followed his reflection in my rearview mirror. I kept watching as he moved toward Sarah’s boxwoods, where he let the mulch slide from his shovel into empty portions of the newly cut bed. He glanced down the hill, in my direction, as if curious himself. Or else he was wondering why that lady with the unfortunate yard was staring at him. That caught me up short. I didn’t want to be the white lady staring at the black stranger in the neighborhood. I’d encountered too many small-minded people like that over the years, and I had a horror of seeming like one of them.
It was the second week of March, just after five o’clock, and I was fifty-two years old. Even now I can imagine recording those details in a mental journal, as if I already knew that this moment—the first time I laid eyes on Giles Owita—was something I’d always remember. It was within that sliver of awareness that I noticed the newly sprouting lime-green grass in Sarah’s yard, and the fresh leaves on the maple trees that lined our neighborhood’s sidewalk. Some overhanging branches, not yet full and leafy-green, curved in almost perfect symmetry above the stranger’s head, and I was reminded of an abstract and imperfect halo. Everything about this man, from the lush green of the plants he worked on to the coiled energy that seemed to direct his movements, exuded health. I envied him this blessing.
Almost ten years had passed since I was first diagnosed with cancer in my left breast, but I still felt shaken. Not that anyone other than my husband knew this. If you were a friend of mine in those days, you would have said,
She handled it so well, both the lumpectomy and the radiation. She went right on with her activities and didn’t complain. Her faith was strengthened. She was not afraid. She was a wonderful example for all of us.
But none of this would have been true. Secretly, I was an utter coward. I felt marked—doomed. I had been heartsick and consumed by fear. I worried then, and I have worried every day since then. I had spent too many hours in the past ten years examining my body for bad omens.
The sky was tinged with the lovely light blues and pinks of late afternoon. I parked in our driveway and walked toward our brick front porch, all the while thinking of luck and prayers—the ones that seemed to get answered and the ones that didn’t. Upstairs in my bedroom, tucked away in my jewelry box, I still had a little prayer in the form of a poem I wrote for my children before my surgery almost ten years ago. That prayer had worked—I’d lived to see all three of them grown up, and I hoped to live a lot longer yet. But hope was a fragile thing, and if that poem symbolized an answered prayer for me, it also reminded me that our hold on everything we love is tenuous. The more we cherish, the more we fear losing.
I twisted my front-door key to the sounds of our beagle, Rhudy, scrambling through the foyer. I let him out through the screen door and into the backyard. A few minutes later, with my glass of sweet iced tea, I stood at our kitchen window, gazing
at the creek. The waters tumbled fast with the season’s thaw. Rhudy sniffed along the fence line. Shadows of trees shifted and mingled with each other on the green-painted asphalt of the basketball court where our children used to play. With creeping embarrassment I noticed the following: muddy splotches in the midst of thinning grass, shrubbery turned brown or wild and out of control, the whole yard littered with twigs blown by the wind, horrifying whorls of crabgrass. It looked shabby. And this was what our neighbors had as their view every day.
I ventured back outside again and up the hill, my footsteps falling at a steady pace on the concrete sidewalk. I walked through Sarah’s front yard and peered over the fence into the back. I saw no trace of the stranger. I pulled my cell phone from my jacket pocket and called Sarah’s number. It went straight to voice mail so I left her a message: “Hey—it’s Carol. I saw the new guy working in your yard. Do you think he’s got time for another client?”
I lingered at the fence and looked at Sarah’s meditation garden. Last year, she had added a charming pebble path that wound its way through a tumble of gardenias and calla lilies. There were wrought-iron benches, and an especially lovely garden angel cast in concrete served as a focal point. My world was about to expand in unexpected ways, but all I noticed on that cloudless day was a yard that made me feel inferior. Envy, thy name is Carol Wall.
I walked back down the hill to my house. Rhudy barked from the backyard, but I just kept going indoors. Fatigue caught up
with me. Not for the first time, I wondered why it was that some people could bounce from work to the grocery store and back home again, and then immediately make a smiling, nourishing meal for all their family to enjoy. That’s never been me. We’d had plenty of lovely meals together as a family, and our home had been filled with joy. But whenever I walked in the door after a long day at work the first thing I looked for was a chair. I needed to recharge my batteries. Then, after a half hour or so I could get up again.
When we moved from Radford to Roanoke and all the painting and decorating was complete, I looked at my three children and I said, “Go upstairs, take Rhudy with you, and don’t come down again until you’re grown.” Of course I was joking (sort of). Our lives were a jumble of dueling schedules—teaching high school for me, practicing law for my husband, plus all the children’s practices for sports, dance and piano lessons, and recitals. Not to mention the emergencies that multiplied with each child you brought into the world. The chaos grounded me in daily things that had to be done for others. There was our older son Chad’s learning disability that he bravely overcame, our daughter Jennie’s terrifying brush with melanoma (a growth that turned out to be benign, but not before scaring the living daylights out of all of us), and our younger son Phil’s nearly devastating loss of a functioning thyroid. As a result he’d tumbled into a deep depression at just eleven years old—the very same year that I received my cancer diagnosis. That was not a good year.
With my son’s illness to occupy my thoughts, there was little time left to worry about myself, but I managed to pencil it in anyway. Would the cancer come back? That was a question I’d asked every day of my life, sometimes multiple times. The odds were stacked heavily against recurrence. At least that is what I was told by my Handsome Oncologist (I named him this without fear of contradiction). But when the “C” word has been mentioned even once in your life, the diagnosis is a ghost that chases you forever after. It’s best to keep moving, as fast as possible. If, now and then, I paused in front of a mirror, it was only to rearrange my bangs or freshen up my lipstick. I dared not look too closely, for fear of finding a lump, bump, mole, or other symptom someone had missed. This had become my life.
I’d always thought of myself as the caregiver—the one whose lot in life was to
bring
the casserole and not to receive it. Way back in seventh grade when we were giving student government speeches, I noticed a friend of mine was about to faint right in the middle of her address. I got up without hesitating, went to her, and said, “Patty, you need to sit down.” I still recall how deeply satisfying it was to me that I was able to help. I thought to myself even then,
That’s the kind of person I am. I keep my poise under fire, and I help those who are in need.
But breast cancer flipped my whole sense of self on its head. I had the oddest sensation that God had gotten me mixed up with someone else.
Perhaps that was why my friends all thought I’d triumphed so beautifully over my cancer diagnosis. I found my illness so shameful, so embarrassing, that I simply refused to confide in
anyone other than Dick about my fears. I also disliked the way that cancer exposed me. An introvert by nature, I found it unsettling how people felt completely comfortable asking for the most intimate details about my illness and treatment. Bless their hearts, I knew that when friends called me, they’d already done their research—they would have asked someone else how my most recent test results had turned out, so they’d know whether the news was good or bad. I felt like I was walking around town with a big “C” for cancer emblazoned on my chest. In our smallish town, the quest for fresh gossip could be intense. It was a kind of currency that people exchanged. And I hated the feeling that my illness had become fodder for talk, well intentioned or not.
I also didn’t feel like I could be as positive as everyone expected me to be. I didn’t want to wear pink, or claim I felt bright and rosy about the future, when in truth I was often terrified. I had learned the hard way that people don’t want to hear that kind of talk from cancer survivors—it sounds so defeatist to their ears. But I figured I was entitled to feel a little discouraged. Cancer made me realize that I was not in charge of things, and I never was. That scared me, and it downright terrified Dick. He hated it when I sounded negative. He wanted us to focus on the upside. He constantly reminded me that the doctors had said the cancer was unlikely to come back—I just needed to be careful, to remain vigilant, and to withstand the agonizing wait for test results after every mammogram. That was easy for him to say.
So I pushed down my fears. But like the situation in our yard, the more I tried to ignore them, the more my fears grew and
blossomed into anger. They turned wild and uncontrollable, their roots tripping me up when I least expected it. I wished there was a gardener who could help me with that particular problem. Instead, I’d settle for some improvement in the crabgrass, and the help of the stranger who’d worked such miracles in my neighbor’s yard.
PRAYER FOR MY CHILDREN, AGES 16, 13, AND 10
[Written with Trembling Hand, on the Eve of the Biopsy that Followed a “Suspicious” Mammogram]
May nothing bad ever happen to them, Dear Lord
May they look to the top of the hill
and see me walking toward them, through the meadow
May they never fear abandonment of any kind
May I be well
May I be there
For I’m their Mother.
Amen.