Gardening alone after 41 years

 

Cleaning up our Arizona garden alone, spring and summer 2020

The last five months of Tom's life we spent in Old River, Texas, staying at the rent home of one of my sister's, a home that had once belonged to a great-aunt. The chemo having failed after a year of slowing the cancer, Tom was put on a trial cancer medication. However, the cancer either spread or the trial medication caused swelling and a blockage to his colon occurred. He was in and out of MD Anderson Cancer Center hospital a good part of April and most of May. Surgery finally eliminated the blockage, but there was no cure for the cancer. Told he would live just a few weeks, Tom lived for five more months in which we were able to return to our home in Arizona three times, a week each time. So the spring and summer of 2019, when we would ordinarily be gardening at our home in Arizona, was spent away from the garden we had created there.

When I returned to Arizona in December, a month after Tom's death, I found a weedy, overgrown garden, and in the spring of 2020, I was determined to clean it up myself. I set to work digging out the weeds and turning over soil with a shovel. It was hard work, and I relished it. Grief is a lonely experience, and there in Apache County, Arizona, in the middle of a pandemic, the loneliness increased. The manual labor kept me occupied in a way that no other activity could have done.

Cucumbers and Scarlet Runner Beans covering a trellis that Tom built

My 2020 crop of Sweet Armenian Heirloom cucumbers did very well.

As we had abandoned organized religion years before, our love of the natural world and our transient experiences with it became much more important to me and Tom. So in working in the garden, noticing the change of seasons and the abundance of all that we had cared for--the grapes, the apples, the flowers I had planted and those planted by a former owner that I tended, and now the few vegetables I chose to grow in the weeded garden--I was paying homage to Tom and to our life together.

I planted several kinds of sunflowers that summer of 2020

Cassie and I taking a break from gardening, summer of 2020

The first week of September 2020, I said a final goodbye to the last garden Tom and I had created together. Now I am trying my hand at urban gardening near Atlanta, Georgia, in zone 7b.

My yard here in Georgia is very shady. Two large water oaks in the backyard shade half of the front yard from early-afternoon, onward, and the backyard is shade or part shade. The water oaks are old; violets and monkey grass grow in crevices near the ground, and one tree has a large mushroom growth on it.

 When old water oaks begin to decay, the rot spreads rapidly in their roots, and they can fall more easily during heavy downpours or windy weather. However, a local arborist advised me not to have them cut down, and so I anxiously watch them in every windy storm that passes through.

Now I am trying to figure out how to garden in a partly shady yard, and I have been watching the movement of the sun across the property, a difficult task lately since we have had so many rainy or cloudy days. This will be my first garden without Tom's imprint. I want to make the best of it in honor of him and of our many years of gardening together.

Some of the produce from my 2020 garden in Arizona

 

Tom planting shallots in our Arizona garden, 2016 or 2017