Mister Owita's Guide to Gardening: How I Learned the Unexpected Joy of a Green Thumb and an Open Heart (9 page)

G
radually, over the coming months, Giles broke me—cured me—of my dread of flowers.

The first stage of my treatment came in the spring, almost exactly a year after he first walked into our yard. It was an early April morning, and the freakish snow we’d had the night before had already melted.

In my walk-in closet, I took careful sips of my coffee. Deciding what to wear to school this time of year was tricky. I whisked through skirts and slacks and blouses on their hangers. Nothing appealed to me. It was Friday, and it flashed through my mind to simply conjure up a case of sniffles, call in sick, and climb beneath the covers with my mug of coffee, a couple of good books, and remote control in hand.

Instead, I pulled the curtain back to check the weather. This was when I saw the first of them, a nodding cluster of pure white daffodils between the first boxwood and the second, in the bed below my window.

I hadn’t planned for these flowers. Yet at once, I knew whose loving hands had prepared this surprise.

My feet were bare, but I didn’t let that stop me. With silky bathrobe fluttering, I ran down the stairs and flung open the front door.

“What are you doing?” Dick called out, but I kept going.

I stepped quickly through the yard. In the front, I found crocuses. They were tiny, white, and blooming in profusion. How long had they been there? How could I not have noticed them before?

In the backyard were more flowers—daffodils and crocuses. They were all in shades of white. They were everywhere, white flowers collaring the asphalt basketball court, and yet more white flowers spilling all along the fence line. There were white snowdrops and a stand of what I’d learn later was white alyssum. There would soon be white tulips and blossoms of sweet woodruff that I would come to love as well.

Stepping back to stand beneath the river birch, I knew that spring had come and, with it, an important moment in my history with Giles.
Every yard must have its flowers,
he’d said to me. How long ago must he have planned this surprise for me? It had to have been before I’d told him about Barbara. And yet somehow
he knew that this sea of white flowers was what my broken heart needed.

With childlike joy, I reached to pluck a single daffodil. The scent was sweet. I wanted to see it standing upright in a small amount of water. Somewhere in this house of mine, though in another life, perhaps, I was pretty sure I had a bud vase.

•   •   •

During the summer months following my spring surprise, I found myself actually considering adding some color to our tidy green space. Those white flowers had been the tipping point, and now the slide into color seemed like a gentle, inevitable slope. Besides, I trusted Giles. So one late August afternoon, I asked him if he still had any colorful flowers needing a home. He was ecstatic.

“Nothing gaudy, Giles,” I nervously reminded him. “And only a few, remember. Not too many and not too much color. It’s really a form of recycling, when you think of it,” I added piously.

My answer came in a matter of days when sweet red primroses appeared. They were quickly followed by some lemon-yellow daylilies to complement the dwarf-sized junipers that seemed a little lonely in their semicircular beds at the end of the sidewalk.

In early September, Giles brought purple-bearded irises for an empty-looking spot beside the driveway. Later that same day, I watched him work a corner of the backyard to make room for
transplants taken from a larger hosta he had found “within a compound that was very, very crowded.”

I would have loved to see what “very, very crowded” meant to him. Yet again, I wondered what his own yard looked like. Did he have a birch tree? Boxwoods? An arbor to accommodate a climbing rose? I thought of Lok, just as I did each time I saw a rose or when a silver jet passed overhead.

I thought of my own father. He no longer seemed to recognize me, and outings became increasingly difficult to manage. I was glad he hadn’t been with me today, to see what I allowed to happen to Mama in Dr. Mitchell’s parking lot.

Arriving at the doctor’s office, I had felt noble helping Mama step out of my van. I imagined people smiling at the sight of us, saying, “Would you just look at that responsible, care-giving daughter? She is so devoted.” Mama indeed looked well taken care of in a new navy sweat suit with white trim and a long, wide zipper on the jacket. Her hair had been freshly washed and trimmed at the Hearth’s beauty shop. A new, off-white rinse with muted rosy tones brought out the best in her coloring, and as usual, her makeup was applied meticulously by her capable hand. Her running-style shoes were ones she hadn’t worn much, and when I saw them as I was picking her up at the Hearth, I pushed down the impulse to suggest we go back inside and choose a pair she had already broken in a bit more, for safety’s sake.

She insisted the new shoes were comfortable, and told me what I knew was a lie, saying that she’d been practicing walking
in them for several weeks. “Carol, I am not going to fall. You worry too much.

“Aren’t they bright and white?” she added as she took my arm. “They look new. As if I’ve been polishing them. Or saving them for the senior Olympics.”

As we made our way across the parking lot toward Dr. Mitchell’s office, I noticed Mama wincing with almost every step. I handed her a nondescript cane I had bought for her at Walmart. At first, she had mentioned bringing the Kenyan cane, which she was so proud of and intrigued by. I told her that I didn’t think it was a good idea. The cane was too beautiful to use. Anyway, I had estimated that with only ten or twelve steps, we could reach the door of the doctor’s office.

We began our journey. I had my lightweight Vera Bradley pocketbook on one arm, and my mother’s Aigner bag dangled from my other shoulder. Every woman knows that when you control someone’s pocketbook, you are the Alpha Girl. My mother was using her cane with one hand and holding on to my elbow with the other. She was safe and I was in charge. Or, that’s what I thought.

But when we reached the step-up for the curb, it seemed I had her in my sights one moment, and then, before I knew it, she had fallen hard. With her arms so weak and reflexes slow, she had no means of breaking her fall. I watched helplessly as her forehead slammed against the concrete sidewalk. The sound was hideous, and I cried out.

My mother was able to roll onto her back. She stared at the
bright blue sky, unable to get up. I knelt beside her, horrified by the large knot that was forming in the middle of her forehead. I hoped it would be bandaged quickly and she wouldn’t see it. But her fingers found the knot. She touched it gently, but seemed to be in shock and had no reaction. Dr. Mitchell would later say that the curb was about an inch too tall for her current ability to step up. I berated myself. I should have thought of that. I’m sure there was a different route we might have used, had I been less focused on projecting an image of the ideal daughter and more attentive to Mama’s actual difficulties.
Not a single one of us is perfect,
I could imagine hearing my daddy say in my head. That was the only redemptive moment of the afternoon.

Oh, how I wished to have his counsel right now. Mama, injured and unable to get herself up, lay with her head and shoulders on the sidewalk. Her legs trailed into the parking lot. Just then, a young woman in her thirties pulled into the lot.

“Oh, my goodness!” she said. “Want me to send a doctor or nurse out?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “You’re an angel.
Malaika
, in Swahili, it would be.” She looked at me strangely, but I was just grateful she had arrived.

Once in Dr. Mitchell’s office, Mama was thoroughly examined, but we were no closer to finding out why Mama’s walking had deteriorated so rapidly. I took Mama’s arm gingerly as we left the doctor’s office and walked to my van. I felt shaky on the drive back to the Hearth, but I managed to get her settled for a nap.

Later on that very afternoon, as I was in my kitchen downing Xanax with some sweet iced tea and feeling sorry for myself, I heard Giles’s car pull up.

“How are your parents doing?” he asked as I appeared. Feeling paranoid, I wondered if news of Mama’s fall had spread. “Especially your mother and those problems with her gait,” he innocently added. “What have the medics found out?”

Panic nibbled at the edges of my seeming poise. “Mama and Daddy are doing very well,” I answered, joining Giles beside the Neon’s open trunk.

Hoping for a change of subject, I peered into the trunk and saw a cardboard box containing several plastic bags.

“Any news of Lok?” I asked.

“They have now notified Lok that she will have to submit to a DNA test,” Giles said. “To show she is really our daughter, and not an impostor stealing someone else’s identity.”

The September sun was harsh, and reflected sharp shards of light against the bumpers of our vehicles. I used my hand to shade my eyes. Giles opened up one bag and pulled some blade-like leaves out by their pale white, stringy roots.

“I’m so sorry for the delay, Giles. I’m sure it’s just a formality, though, and then Lok will be with you.” Giles was quiet and I sensed he didn’t want to talk more about it so I changed the subject. “I keep meaning to tell you how much my mother loves to hear about your progress in our yard, Giles.”

“I like your mother very, very much,” he said. “And I am going to plant more roses in her honor, somewhere in this yard.
Tell her that, and that I will escort her through this bright green grass to see them, very soon. What would she like?”

“Oh, any kind. She’s not particular.” But then, remembering, I said, “When I was growing up, we had these really pretty, deep red roses. They were very large, and had the sweetest scent. She loved to place them on our kitchen table. She would float them in a clear, cut-glass bowl. You know, it even seemed those roses made the food taste better.”

“Flowers sweeten everything,” Giles said, content that we agreed on this, at last.

“Well, I like all of these,” I told him, surveying the load he’d brought in his trunk. “So if you want to plant them here, it’s fine.” By the time my voice broke, Giles had already turned toward me with a look of concern.

I could no longer pretend that everything was all right. “Giles, she fell at the doctor’s office today and it was my fault. I was thinking about the wrong things and she tripped on the curb. She’s okay, but she has a terrible knot on her forehead.”

“I am sorry, Mrs. Wall,” Giles said.

I looked into the distance. “She wanted to use your Kenyan cane, and why didn’t I let her do that? It’s touching how much she loves it. She told me that she was going to take it to a show-and-tell at Heathwood Hearth.”

“I know,” Giles said. “I was there.”

“You were there, Giles?”

“I was making a delivery to Heathwood Hearth for the Garden Shoppe a couple of weeks ago, and I saw your mother. She
asked if I would come back the next day to answer questions about the cane. Your mother appreciates fine things. She told the group that learning about other cultures is rather like traveling the world.”

“Really, Giles? I’m glad to hear that. She has seemed so quiet lately. To tell the truth, I have been afraid that she’s depressed. I wonder why she doesn’t mention things like this to me. Perhaps I need to be a better listener, do you think?”

A few days later, I went to the Hearth to have lunch with my parents. Mama’s head was still bandaged, and I told her that I had been wrong to advise her not to use Giles’s cane. She should use it exactly as she saw fit, I said. Then I told her about the roses that Giles was planting for her in my yard—deep red roses, just like the ones back home.

M
y growing friendship with Giles was like a river that sometimes split into two separate streams, but always came back together again. We’d get busy with other things in our lives and follow our own paths for a while. With the arrival of winter there wasn’t so much yard work to do, and Giles worked longer shifts at the grocery store, so days or a week might pass without our exchanging even a few words. But then when we saw each other again, we picked up right where we left off, as if we’d been saving up everything we had to say to each other, just waiting for an opportunity to spill.

Our conversations always started with family. I asked after Lok, he asked about my children and my parents. Then, inevitably, something would take us off on a flight of intellectual
fancy, and we’d find ourselves immersed in a conversation about space and time and the theory of relativity. Whatever the subject matter, Giles seemed to know something about it. This was amazing and delightful to me. I had no other friend like him, no one else who was so willing and happy to ponder such things along with me. Fate had sent a professor to my door, and my conversations with him were like a dream class—we didn’t talk about anything that didn’t interest us, and there was absolutely no homework.

I’d been a good student in school, but no one had ever accused me of being an intellectual. In truth, no one would have wanted me to be—when I was young, girls weren’t pushed to excel academically. A girl who got a 4.0 average might as well have hung a sign on her chest that said: “Doomed Never to Marry.” There were two career choices that were considered acceptable for girls: teacher or nurse. One day in high school, the boys and girls were divided into groups to talk about our future aspirations. Our guidance counselor, a woman with hair teased so high that it practically scraped the ceiling, asked all of us girls to write on a form what we wanted to be when we grew up. I dutifully wrote “Teacher.” My friend wrote “Doctor.” When the guidance counselor walked around collecting the forms she made my friend erase “Doctor” and change it to “Nurse.”

I considered myself a life-long learner with a curious mind, but I’d been perfectly satisfied to stop my formal education after college. Over the years, as the kids were growing up, I occasionally wondered what might have happened if I had chosen another
path—maybe a master’s in English or even a Ph.D., leading to a job as a professor. But those were idle musings—I knew myself well enough to know that graduate school would never have been for me. I was a happy dilettante, and I loved following my own nose, picking up books on topics as they interested me. As soon as someone else told me what I had to study, it sucked the joy right out of it for me. So my conversations with Dr. Giles Owita became my ideal postgraduate education. I even took notes.

I could see that Giles also enjoyed our conversations. As he answered my questions, the cadence in his voice would change. He couldn’t hide the joy he found in teaching, and at times like that I had to stop myself from saying out loud how shortsighted those universities had been in not hiring him. His talent for explaining concepts that could otherwise be dreary or far too difficult always amazed me, so I made it a habit to ask him about anything that flew way over my head. One time, I’d been reading a biography of Einstein, and had been mulling one of his trickier thought experiments.

“Giles, I’m confused. I just finished reading about the passenger riding on the train that’s struck by lightning. I still don’t understand why the person on the train and the person on the platform see two different things, and what exactly that proves.”

Just as I knew he would, Giles warmed to the subject with relish and announced that he was going to look for one of his college texts that would help me better understand the concept. He said he would loan it to me, and I felt honored, as if I had been promoted from beginner to intermediate.

I thought about this as I drove into town a few weeks before Christmas. Giles had given me so much since our friendship had begun a year and a half before. I wondered what I could ever give him in return. As happy as he always was to see me, I couldn’t believe that he got nearly as much as I did from our conversations. Each time I walked away from Giles, I felt either enlightened by his brilliance or unburdened of some of my worries and sadness. I wished I could do the same for him.

•   •   •

It was after dark and flakes of snow swirled as I pulled into a downtown parking lot beside the Farmer’s Market. Dick was supposed to meet me there after work to look at Christmas trees. Stars twinkled from the velvet depths of night. Strands of colored Christmas lights zigzagged up and down the length of Market Street. Pulled into the festive atmosphere, I paused at cheery store windows decorated with familiar scenes of reindeer in the snow or children peering down the stairs to see what Santa brought.

I heard a woman’s voice calling my name. It was Elaine, the biology teacher at school. She held a clutch of pine boughs in her hand. We exchanged greetings, and I told her that I was on a hunt for a tree.

“You should buy one from Giles,” she said. “He’s over there, across the street. Apparently, his son is on a travel soccer team, and they’re doing it as a fund-raiser.”

I held a hand up. “Stop! We’ve been there!” I laughingly
explained all the brownies, candy bars, and boxes of flavored popcorn I’d sold from metal folding tables in various commercial parking lots over the years. Not to mention the yard sales. All in the service of one of the kids’ sports teams.

“Say hi to Giles for me,” Elaine said as she ran off with her boughs. She was yet another of Giles’s many fans, ever since I’d passed his name along to her after she’d told me that her yard was suffering from the drought. I wondered anew how Giles managed to do everything he did—hold down multiple jobs, work for more and more private clients, and sell Christmas trees for his son’s soccer team. I spotted the handmade sign across the street where fir trees held their arms out, catching snowflakes.

ROANOKE COMETS
STATE SOCCER CHAMPIONS . . . DIVISION 3-A
. . . HELP US GO TO NATIONALS!

I scanned the soccer booth for any sign of Giles. Then a six-foot pine with perfect symmetry attracted my eye.

There was one person manning the booth, his back to me. From the shape of him, I suspected he was one of the soccer players—he was tall enough to seem fully grown, but he had the sinewy build of a teenager. “Excuse me. Could I see this one?”

The tree was loosely tied with string and leaned back toward a support post. Above where it rested, a canvas awning had filled up with snow. I pulled my winter gloves off, fingering the
fragrant needles as more falling snow sifted through the leafless branches of the maple trees that lined the street.

The boy who turned around looked familiar, and I realized immediately that he must be Giles’s son. He was indeed in his teens and towered over me. His smile was just as electric as his father’s. “Sure,” he said to me. “I like that one, myself. Let me stand it up for you. The branches fall just right. It’s almost like a Christmas card.”

“Are you Dr. Giles Owita’s son?” I impulsively asked the boy.

He paused, seeming uncomfortable, the way any teenage boy would be when put on the spot.

“Your father is a friend of ours. And he does some landscape work for us as well.”

“Oh, right. He’s pretty good at that. I’m Naam.”

“I’m Carol Wall,” I said. “My husband and I just love your dad’s work.”

We shook hands.

“Is your brother here as well, and your mom?”

“Yes, ma’am. They’re selling wreaths. Across the street, and farther down. You see?”

The falling snow created a temporary scrim, yet soon it slowed to yield a vision of Bienta huddled at a table strewn with greenery and wreaths and velvet bows for sale.

Naam took some pruning shears and snipped the string from the tree. I resisted the temptation to embarrass him further by telling him that I’d been hearing all about him and his siblings
for some time. Instead, I focused on the way the pine tree branches quivered as they settled into shape.

“Oh, it’s beautiful,” I said. “I’d like to buy it.”

He took my folded bills. Then I saw Giles advancing toward us from about a block away. His footsteps were energetic as he hurried down the sidewalk from the coffee shop. “Here’s Dad,” Naam said.

“Hot chocolate!” Giles announced, balancing several cups in a paper carrier. He handed one to his son, then smiled at me.

“Would you like a hot chocolate, Mrs. Wall?”

“Oh. No thanks. Dick is taking me out for a sandwich soon, and I don’t want to spoil my appetite. Are you taking one over to Bienta? Do you mind if I walk over with you? I’d love to say hello.”

Giles nodded and said of course, but I noticed he stiffened a bit and grew guarded. I’d noticed lately that he often did that when the subject of Bienta arose. I knew that the loss of a child could hit spouses in different ways, sometimes causing a rift. I wondered if their separation from Lok had done the same to them. Giles always went out of his way to praise Bienta and how accomplished she was, but it seemed to me that there was a wistfulness to the way he spoke about Bienta, a sadness mixed with his admiration. He had told me how she’d managed a farm in Kenya, and how in her work as a nurse she had delivered two babies with nothing but a lantern to find the mothers’ huts and a razor blade to cut the umbilical cords. Bienta was an amazing
woman, and Giles was a remarkable man. In so many ways they seemed perfectly suited to each other. But life had brought them so many disappointments.

When we reached Bienta, she smiled politely. “How is your mother?”

“My mother is somewhat better, thank you. Her spirits are good.”

Giles extended a cup of hot chocolate toward Bienta after having carefully wrapped a napkin around it to absorb the heat. I watched as she shook her head, her body turned away. He was clearly eager to please her, and I felt uneasy, as if I had stumbled onto a private conversation that wasn’t going well.

I introduced myself to
Wath, their younger son. He was shorter than Naam and had a more compact build. His eyelashes were long and his expression held a merry aspect that reminded me of Giles. Yet he seemed more instantly at ease, more outgoing and chatty than either his brother or his father. He exuded the confidence of a well-loved youngest child.

I bought a wreath from Bienta, as well as a red ribbon from Wath. Across the street, Naam had wrapped my lovely pine tree with twine and called to his dad for help in carrying it to my van.

“I may be calling or writing you soon. About my parents,” I said to Bienta in parting, “if you don’t mind me taking advantage of some of your nursing expertise.”

“I would love to be of help,” she said, and I felt she meant it.

A few minutes later, as Giles fit the tree into the van, I asked
him, “How have you been?” He produced string to tie the hatch down.

“I’m very well,” he said.

He took off his heavy gloves in order to tie the string. As I watched him work, I glimpsed a scar on the side of his wrist, which in all our time together I had never noticed. The scar was three or four inches long and slightly jagged. “My God, what happened to your wrist, Giles?”

He looked at the scar and his eyes grew narrow, as if he’d forgotten and needed to refresh his memory. Then he blinked, his lids two tranquil-looking crescent shapes. “I had a melanoma. This was several years ago, in Blacksburg. A course of treatment was prescribed.”

“Surgery?”

“Yes. Removal of the mole and some surrounding tissue.”

Giles had cancer? I struggled to fit this new information into the image I had formed of Giles as the picture of health. I took a moment to reimagine him leaping into my birch tree, but this time he missed his mark and fell to the ground. It gave me a chill, and I shrank farther into my wool overcoat.

“I just can’t believe that you had melanoma, Giles.” The words came quickly, and as quickly, I regretted that I’d spoken them. They sounded accusatory, somehow. Just exactly like what a casual acquaintance, Ella, had said to me at church at the time of my cancer diagnosis. She had spoken in a tone of voice more suited to addressing someone who’d been caught stealing money from the collection plate. “You, Carol? Oh no! You’ve
always seemed so healthy. I never would have thought it. Your voice is strong and it carries so well from the loft. Are you a vegetarian? You seem to exercise a lot. Were you breast-fed as a baby?”

“No and no,” I’d said, stifling a laugh, which may have been what saved me from killing her.

Now I realized that my own tone of voice betrayed a note of shock that really had as much (or more) to do with fears for myself as it did with Giles. It was scary when a healthy, able man like Giles had cancer. Just like Ella had done with me, I struggled to make sense of it, to come up with something that Giles might have done—or not done—to cause it. I of all people should have known better, and yet here I was doing the same ignorant thing that I’d railed against since my own diagnosis. Cancer was a disease, not a judgment, and we were all at risk—in spite of our healthy habits.

Finally, I ventured another question. “Did you have to have chemo?”

“A course of chemotherapy was recommended. That’s true enough. I did not welcome it. In fact, I stopped before its course had run. After the first chemotherapy treatment, I could see it interfered with working, and I had a family to feed. So I told them I would not be back. This did not stop the scheduler from calling me, every time, and when I answered, she would give me my appointment time and place. And with each and every call, my answer was the same. ‘Thank you very much. I will not be there!’”

He chuckled at the memory, shaking his head with an air of
wry amusement. Apparently, he had not elaborated on his answer to that chemo scheduler. He had just offered his polite decline in his usual lilting tone, as if he were simply turning down a second cup of coffee.

The nurse probably thought she was dealing with a prankster or a man with a mental problem. I couldn’t help myself. I laughed out loud along with Giles. “I will not be there!” I said, repeating his words while shaking my own head in amazement. He looked at his cancer treatment as if he’d had a choice about it, as if it were a restaurant menu and no one could force him to eat what he didn’t want. Lord knew that had never occurred to me. My Handsome Oncologist had said that cancer patients are generally exceedingly compliant. They might not like a particular treatment; nonetheless, desperate to be well, they did as told. Apparently, Giles was one of the exceptions.