Mister Owita's Guide to Gardening: How I Learned the Unexpected Joy of a Green Thumb and an Open Heart (17 page)

Rules for a happy marriage (over Time)

1. Kiss. A lot. The world can wait.

2. Clear your mind of your imaginary troubles, as the real ones need some neurons to bounce off of.

3. As to thoughts of “other people . . .” The spouse you pledged your heart to is an “other” person. Guard your words and actions in the sanctity of that.

With love,

Carol

I heard Dick coming back upstairs. His footsteps were measured, a sure sign that his anger had subsided, too. I tore out the page and stashed the letter under his pillow.

I
celebrated the first day of summer vacation by sitting on our front porch, wearing shorts and flip-flops. Rhudy accompanied Giles as he walked slowly through the yard with stilted steps. Giles had come back to work in the spring, and Rhudy was his constant companion, somehow sensing that Giles needed watching over.

Giles leaned on his cane, engrossed in his work. He seemed to be feeling stronger each day, at a pace that matched the increase in temperature and the blooming of the flowers.

Robert Maxim’s new wife wandered over, pointing toward their house and seeking Giles’s wisdom on a matter in her garden. I swore I heard the word “azalea,”
and I winced.

As Giles spoke to her, I thought I saw a kind of resignation in
the way he stood, and I hoped it was just my imagination. There was more gray threading through his hair, I noticed. He and I hadn’t spoken much about his health lately. He much preferred the close inspection of a blighted leaf, or a consultation on a slug that was causing damage, to a conversation that caused him to dwell on how sick he’d been. That only led to the question that plagued my thoughts but that I hadn’t dared to ask. It had now been almost two years since his stroke—would Giles ever regain what he’d lost?

Later that week, I agreed to pick Giles up from his routine doctor appointment. Returning home along the quicker back route I’d at last discovered, I was surprised when Giles abruptly called out, “Mrs. Wall, we must stop here.”

He was clearly tired, but grew more cheerful as he pointed me toward some handsome-looking produce at a roadside stand. I steered my van along the uneven shoulder of the road. My tires protested with a little squeaking sound as they rolled along the asphalt, and before I solved the problem of logistics (how to go around and help Giles out, among these knee-high weeds?), I heard a creaking. Giles had already opened his car door and pushed it wide with his cane. Then he struggled out with no help from me.

His spirits lifted even more while showing me some small tomato plants he wanted me to bring home to my yard. He reminded me how important the angle of the sun would be to whether the tomatoes thrived or not. Then he stopped himself. “In any case, you’re ready to be on your own,” he said.

“This will be my first attempt at growing food,” I said.

“Lok also is very good at cultivating,” he said. “She always has a little kitchen garden.”

I didn’t ask about Lok. The timing didn’t feel right—I sensed that it would only make Giles sad. Instead I held up one plant, and then another. He nodded and said that I had made good choices. They were healthy, green and sturdy, with nice branches, which would soon be set with tiny, star-shaped yellow flowers.

“These are the best ones, right?” I asked again, eager to meet his approval, as if I were his horticulture student and this might be weighed in my final grade.

As the vendor counted my change, I was alarmed to hear Giles stumble on the gravel. His hand went out against the makeshift produce stand, and it trembled under his weight. His mouth drooped slightly at one corner, as I’d noticed it sometimes did when he had pushed himself too far.

“What did the doctor say?” I asked, as if I had a right to know. “Are you okay, Giles?”

“I am fine,” he managed to answer.

I phoned ahead to find out if the boys were at home, and then I drove Giles there. They helped us as we struggled up the ramp and through the door. With his sons giving him support, Giles sank down onto the sofa, leaning back against the cushions with a sigh. Within minutes, he began to recover. His features looked more balanced, and he asked for some water. He even said he was hungry, which I took as a good sign.

Back home, I turned my attention to the assignment Giles had given me. In the stubborn soil of my backyard, I channeled the instructions he had demonstrated over time. I heard him telling me to space the tomato plants well, allowing for their doubling in size in twelve to fifteen days. For a stronger stem, I needed to prune soon after that. One should never prune or tie plants when the leaves are wet, he had told me. You don’t want them to mildew, rot, or break.

I set my gardening gloves aside to feel the warmth of the fertile soil between my fingers. It seemed like such a small thing, and yet it was monumental to me. I was suddenly reminded of Mama teaching me to ride a bike. In the first few sessions, she held on to the back of the seat, running along behind me. Then one day, when I turned around, I was astonished to see I’d left her far behind.

I felt joyful and wistful in equal measures as I guided my tomatoes’ roots into the ground. So much had happened since the day I discovered Giles’s loving gift of white flowers in my yard. And today I had officially become a gardener.

•   •   •

The rest of summer passed all too quickly. Giles and I kept up our routine of seminars and visits to my “compound.” And from my kitchen window, I admired the growth of my thriving tomatoes. They were impossibly beautiful, yielding small red globes that seemed to glow in the afternoon sun.

The day before school started, I drove across town to place
my very best tomato on Giles’s kitchen windowsill. I found him sitting in his wheelchair by the front window.

“Giles, you are truly a great teacher if you can help someone like me produce such beauty out of my backyard. I never dreamed I could do this.”

Giles smiled. “I have always enjoyed helping others discover the process, and I find myself learning each time I work with students.”

I sat down near him. I didn’t want to rush this visit. With school starting again, I might not feel so free again for a while. “I’ve always been curious about that picture on your bookshelf, Giles, the one of you in your white lab coat, and the students proudly holding those large cabbages. Was that taken in Kenya?”

“Yes. I was teaching at Egerton College, near Nakuru. The picture was taken on a three-acre demonstration unit we had in the horticulture department. I taught vegetable production, including field preparation, rotation, irrigation, pest control, management, and even marketing. The produce was sold at reduced prices to staff and faculty.” He held up a finger as if to emphasize the point he was about to make. “I always told my students that it is necessary to go out in the field. A book is just a start, and a laboratory project pales beside examination of the thing itself.”

I thought of the hundreds of students who must have heard this, marching along behind their teacher in his white coat. Giles kept his eyes fixed on the photo, and I wondered if he was
pondering all the future accomplishments he’d looked forward to that day. I imagined how proud he must have felt to have already taken such a big step on his and Bienta’s journey toward their ultimate goals.

On the bookshelf just behind him was a leather-bound copy of his dissertation.
Giles Owita: Doctor of Philosophy in Horticulture
was stamped in gold on the spine
.

These few words captured so much of the dream Giles had prepared himself to transform into reality. His education was the one part of his plan that he could control. But he couldn’t account for other people’s prejudice or limitations. And he couldn’t make himself well. I prayed that he didn’t think he had failed. I thought of his children, and how beloved he was.

“Your life is bearing fruit, as well,” Giles said, as if he were channeling my thoughts. “Whatever comes, you must continue working in your garden.”

“Of course,” I promised him. “Whatever comes, I will keep going. And you must promise, my friend, that you’ll continue working right beside me.”

Giles smiled and nodded, but he didn’t reply.

A
s fall grew chilly and gave way to winter, Giles and I developed a regular schedule for our seminars. I went to his house every Wednesday after school, and from time to time, and when weather allowed, he came to my yard. Our garden lessons were always mixed with discussions of more wide-ranging topics. We started with our children, especially Lok, who had just taken the photo for her visa application. Then, inevitably, our conversations veered all across the map from science to philosophy and religion.

To my great delight, Bienta joined the choir in the loft for rehearsals on Thursday nights. She was welcomed warmly as we started our second week rehearsing Advent music. She sang her notes beautifully and laughed at jokes along with everyone. But I
had sensed a distance between the two of us ever since the day we’d become aware of her and Giles’s financial hardship. And I just couldn’t seem to cross that great divide. Bienta was such a strong woman, and intimidating in her own way. I so wanted to talk to her about Lok, and ask about Giles’s health, which seemed so frighteningly fragile to me—he’d even taken to using his wheelchair more often again. But I felt as if Bienta hung a “closed for business” sign over her face whenever I came near. Conversation beyond the shallowest pleasantries was rendered impossible.

So I shared my fears with Sarah instead. One Saturday when I was browsing at the Garden Shoppe, I pulled her aside. “Do you think Giles is losing weight? Dick says I’m imagining things. But I don’t think I am. I’m worried he has cancer and he doesn’t want us to know.”

“Cancer?” Sarah said, surprised. “What makes you think he has cancer?”

I thought about mentioning Giles’s melanoma diagnosis, but then I stopped myself. Had I become one of those people I’d always complained about, who treat other people’s illnesses like gossip? “Well, anyone could have cancer,” I said.

“I don’t know, Carol. I’m inclined to agree with Dick on this one. I don’t think there’s any big secret there. I just think Giles is under a lot of stress, and recovery from a stroke is so long and arduous. I’m sure it’s terribly depressing for him not to be able to do the things he once did so easily.”

Driving home, I racked my brain for ways to cheer up Giles.
Then an idea came to me. The snake plant he and Bienta had given me suffered terribly from my total incompetence with houseplants. So I made an appointment to speak with Giles at his earliest convenience about an urgent gardening matter.

“This is my confession,” I told him. “I have been equally negligent through overwatering
and
under-watering, and that’s the truth.”

Where lesser gardeners might have chuckled, Giles found nothing to amuse him as his eyes took in the horror of the situation. The succulent whose upright, green-and-golden glory used to please had faded to a withered stalk the color of a brown paper grocery bag.

“It must be severely pruned. That is the only answer,” he decreed.

He sat a little straighter in his wheelchair. Then he grasped the sofa arm to pull his chair across the rug to save the poor plant from my deadly clutches. He seemed energized, in fact, to see the plant’s neglected state. He asked me to go into the yard and bring his pruning shears inside. I zipped up my jacket and started for the back door.

He called after me, “Look under the tarps and choose a specimen you like. Bring it in to me and we will work on that, too.”

Outside, I stooped to lift the garish tarps I’d disrespected so many times. Underneath, I found a sight whose quiet beauty took my breath away. In the shelter of the covered chairs and benches were a host of tiny seedlings, clearly thriving. They’d all been rescued, Giles would tell me later, from other people’s
curbside trash. Falling to my knees to get a better look, I saw how all this while, beneath the unattractive surface, the gears of life had been turning, nature ticking beautifully along like the mesmerizing works of an expensive watch.

Dr. Giles Owita’s backyard rescue project had flourished despite illness and cold winds. Finding this felt like a Christmas morning discovery of a shiny new bike under the tree. That feeling intensified as I looked under each and every tarp throughout the yard and uncovered treasures everywhere. There were countless scores of tiny pots containing little conifers, fledgling sprigs of holly, and myriad green things rescued from obscurity and tended by the greenest thumb in Roanoke.

“Mrs. Wall? Have you found what you were looking for?” Giles called to me from his back door.

I chose a tiny conifer as my specimen, grabbed the shears, and went back inside. I helped Giles roll his wheelchair to the kitchen table, situated in a charming alcove off the living room. Then I pulled out a chair and sat beside him, feeling as I always did when I watched him work—like a lucky student basking in the reflected brilliance of a gifted professor.

Hideous debris fell away from the ailing snake plant as Giles performed his regimen of snips and clips, his movements all but automatic. “This will be fine,” he said. “Please take it back home with you.”

Then, under Giles’s instruction, I added peat moss to the soil around the feathery pine tree seedling I had chosen. When I hesitated at any point, Giles couldn’t restrain his hand from
reaching out to help me. Once we’d finished he said, “Let me keep this one for a little while. I will let you know when it is ready.”

We settled in Giles’s living room again, and as always our conversation meandered, and I waxed philosophical. “You know, I was reading the other day about Einstein’s theory that space and time are elastic. What does that mean to you, Giles? Do you think it could mean that we might pass this way again?”

“This is a mystery,” Giles said. “What do you think?”

“Are we speaking science, or religion?”

“Einstein said that they are one.” Then he looked in my direction with that old familiar twinkle in his eye. “But I can always take the matter to my Virginia Tech doctoral panel for some further answers and get back to you.”

•   •   •

After Christmas, Giles called to say that my little orphan tree was thriving and it was time for me to take it home.

When I stopped by Giles’s house to pick it up, I found myself growing emotional as he handed it to me. I thought about how it had been thrown away as trash, then rescued to a place of nurture underneath the tarps. Now it had an opportunity to become everything it had been created for—and all because Giles had seen the potential in a scrubby little seedling.

“I want to thank you, Giles,” I started to say. “Because without your expertise and patience . . .” My tears welled up and I was reminded of our son Chad, and the learning disability he’d
struggled with in school. I told Giles how one of Chad’s teachers had breezily informed us that he would never be college material. Now he was working on his Ph.D. dissertation.

“Oh, many, many people speak too soon,” Giles said. “And those who know a little less speak even sooner. Perhaps I’ll help you, one day, find that prophesying teacher with her sour-milk approach to children. She cannot be very happy. More unhappy still are the little ones who look to her for nurturing.”

“Yes.” I blotted my eyes and held a tissue to my nose.

Then, to my surprise, Giles’s eyes filled with tears as well. “Perhaps I should not be the one to criticize. I often wonder if I have been too strict with my boys, too apt to point out the bad instead of the good. But they have always been such good boys. Now I see this more clearly. Why was I so insistent about small things that didn’t really matter?”

I had never heard Giles sound so unsure of himself, so regretful. I wished I could rescue him from his uncertainty the way he’d always done for me. “Oh, Giles, there isn’t a parent in the world who hasn’t asked that same question. I certainly have. Half the time I thought I was being too strict, and the other half of the time I thought I was being too lenient. But you have to look at your intentions, Giles. I think that’s what the Good Lord does, don’t you?”

“Yes, He sees and understands all of that, and more.”

Moments later, the spell of our conversation was broken when Bienta and their two sons arrived home. Giles brightened, and I excused myself to leave them to their dinner. That night,
after I returned home, I placed my growing pine tree on the gate-leg table in our living room. I hoped that I had brought Giles some comfort with my visit. And I prayed that he might heal and thrive like that treasure trove of seedlings hidden beneath the nondescript blue tarp in his backyard.