Mister Owita's Guide to Gardening: How I Learned the Unexpected Joy of a Green Thumb and an Open Heart (6 page)

As a senior in high school, I studied Aristotle’s views on the nature of friendship. He described the highest level as “a friendship of virtue,” where there was no agenda other than a devotion to the welfare of your friend. There was no place for selfishness in this kind of relationship. It was more like a calling, anchored in respect and a keen regard for the other person that could not
easily be shaken. Was it possible that Giles Owita could be such a friend to me? Was I worthy of being
his
friend? There was only one way to find out.

Unspoken truth lay between us. I made a quick decision of my own.

“Some people say I have a gloomy outlook,” I said. “I think they may have a point, but I want to tell you about something that makes me that way. Almost ten years ago, I had some tests that indicated breast cancer. I had a lumpectomy and a series of radiation treatments, and my prognosis is good. But the whole experience changed me spiritually and emotionally. I just can’t stop worrying about it. Anytime I see the breast cancer commercials on TV, or I see well-adjusted women in their pink sweatshirts, I just cannot identify with them. I wonder what is going to happen to me next. I can’t stand to think about losing all of the wonderful things in my life.”

“Yes, Mrs. Wall. I understand.” Giles looked across the creek and his eyes grew narrow. His expression, as always, was difficult to read. “Worry is a part of life. For now, there is work to do in our garden.” He knelt to sift through the soil with his bare hands. The sight was mesmerizing.

Filled with a growing resolve, I put my naked hands inside the green garden gloves. My fingers felt bony, too small for the yawning openings.
Just touch the soil of Mother Earth. It would make Giles happy,
a voice inside me said. “All right, Giles. But I’d rather do it this way.” I tugged the right glove off, and then the left.

I allowed my fingertips to brush the surface of the ground.
The soil felt frozen at first, yet I found my fingers soon exploring dirt that clumped and caked, and if dry, fell in ribbons from one hand to the other. Its color and texture reminded me of coffee grounds. I recalled how, in my Southern childhood, we would often go barefoot, without worrying about bee stings, broken glass, parasites, or jagged rocks. By August, our feet would be leather-tough, prepared for anything. The sound of bare feet slapping against dry, hard-packed dirt as we played our games of softball, kickball, tag, or red rover came back to me. It had been a long time since I thought of how quick I used to be—a cagey, confident teammate almost always chosen first when older kids were forming their teams.

As I pondered these memories, I was vaguely aware of Giles going back and forth to the garage for supplies. He handed me a familiar-looking garden claw with chipped red paint on the wooden handle, and I began to lose myself in the work that was nearly as old as the planet itself—scraping, digging, and mixing to prepare the soil for what it did best.

While I worked, I fell under the spell of other memories. The effect was hypnotic. Even my awareness of Giles faded as I was transported to a solitary hemlock where I used to stop for a rest as a child walking home from school. I hadn’t thought of it in years. In my vision, I was sitting in the grass beside the compact tree with feathery-looking, dull blue branches stretching over me. There were bright yellow dandelions around the skirt of the cotton print dress my grandmother had sewn for me, and I was still young enough to feel sorry for children whose
grandmothers didn’t sew and, therefore, sadly, had to buy their dresses from the stodgy women’s clothing stores downtown. I wasn’t on a schedule and had no checklist for the day. All I knew was the happy hum of living in a household run efficiently and lovingly.

I remembered also how I skated down the steep-pitched hill of Sleepy Hollow Road with older children, at a breakneck pace. Or, as the sun began to set, how I climbed my yellow apple tree to the very top with a library book tucked under my arm. I played touch football with neighborhood boys and was a noted wide receiver (even
if
a
girl) in our flat front yard whose curving limestone sidewalk formed the perfect undulating fifty-yard line. Breezes carried the delicious aroma of tender roast beef and buttered biscuits wafting out onto our football field from Mama’s kitchen. She loved to watch our games, but at some point I realized that what she really wanted was another baby and another. She wanted happy, healthy children to fill every corner of her home, to make up for the losses she had suffered. Instead she had to settle for two, me and my younger sister, Judy.

Finally, with the ground prepared, I picked up the gloves and draped them on the fence. Giles and I stood together, looking out across the creek.

“Are your parents living, Giles?”

His eyes grew soft. “My father is deceased. But he had a very interesting and eventful life. His first wife was killed by lightning on Lake Victoria. This would have been in the early forties.
My mother, age twelve or thirteen at the time, was brought into the household as a babysitter to my father’s motherless children. He was an herbalist, within our tribe. Very much older than my mother, who still lives. She was only fourteen when I was born. We are very close, and when I go there, we choose to spend much time talking, and can talk almost forever. She remembers everything. She likes to laugh.”

“I can picture it easily, Giles.”

“She is scarcely five feet tall, yet smart and resourceful,” he continued. “It is said she delivered me as the sun was setting, and then took me out with her to do some chores. Many taller people on the island still look up to her.”

“Did she have other children?”

“I have three sisters and one elder brother who live. Four brothers were lost in childhood. Their ailments seemed to be mysterious. I always thought it may have been a heart arrhythmia, but no one knew for sure. Out in the humid air playing with other children of the village, they simply collapsed, one when he was quite young, and the other, a few years later. I have worried about my own sons, fearing an inherited disorder. Oh, how my mother grieved. I remember her slumped over their lifeless bodies, wailing, unable to be consoled. They were wonderful, lively brothers and friends. I did not have time to say goodbye. We thought we had them, but as the islanders say, it seems they were merely visitors, after all. They ‘went back.’”

“Went back? That’s a beautiful phrase. It seems comforting, somehow. How long did it take your mother to get over that?”

“You never get over certain grief. But there is no pressure in my culture to get over losing a loved one. It is very different from here. Childhood is very dangerous where I come from. There are many perils and diseases. That is why we sometimes say that a child is not your own until he has survived measles.”

My voice stuck somewhere in my throat. Suddenly, a brisk wind brought heavy raindrops, stinging our faces and peppering the fabric of our work clothes. Through all this, the sun continued to shine. Then the rain stopped just as quickly as it had begun.

“When was the last time you saw your mother?” I asked.

But before he could answer, we heard a car horn bleating from the street side of the house.

“Bienta!” he cried out, alarmed. “What time is it, Mrs. Wall?”

With an air of urgency, he gathered his things. I trailed him as he raced around the house, toward the street. The sky-blue Neon was parked at the curb, Bienta at the wheel. She reached over and moved a stack of newspapers from the passenger seat to the floor.

“Our other vehicle is under repair,” Giles called back over his shoulder as he opened the passenger door. “We are sharing today.”

He rolled the window down to offer me his goodbyes. Bienta spoke to him in a foreign language. I hoped she was asking him to introduce us.

I was pleased when he said, “Mrs. Wall, may I present Bienta, my wife? Bienta, please meet Mrs. Wall.”

“Everyone calls me Carol,” I offered, hoping this time it would stick.

Bienta extended her hand. Her features were pleasantly arranged on a pretty face and her lips shimmered with a hint of gloss. Like her husband, she looked to be a little over fifty. She was dressed in jeans and a red-knit, short-sleeved shirt. Her hair was very short and she wore gold hoop earrings.

“It’s very nice to meet you, Bienta,” I said.

She looked at me steadily. Brought up on the mainland and educated in private schools, Bienta apparently did not observe the rules about direct eye contact that Giles learned in his village. Then she spoke to Giles in Luo again.

“My wife is saying . . .” Giles began to translate.

Bienta interrupted him. “You sing in the choir at Saint Benedict’s.” She spoke with enthusiasm and a hint of a British accent. “I realize now that I have seen you, all along, going up for Communion with your fellow choir mates. Giles told me the names of a Mr. and Mrs. Wall and described where you live ‘with your little beagle by the river,’ as he is fond of pointing out. But I didn’t know that it was you, a fellow parishioner whom I so easily would recognize by sight, not until I saw you come around the corner of your house, just now.”

“You are a parishioner at Saint Benedict’s, and have seen me?” I repeated, unable to hide my astonishment. I felt terribly embarrassed that I hadn’t recognized her, and it must have showed.

“I often wear my tribal head wrap to Mass,” Bienta said. “Perhaps that’s why you didn’t recognize me today. Don’t feel bad.
Also, your group is already at the altar just as we are standing up to join the line. I like to sit beside the window of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary. Have you ever sat there, in that golden light? She’s the saint who fed bread to the poor, in the thirteenth century. She and her husband were of royal birth, so he felt such actions were beneath them. When her husband came to accuse her, Our Lord changed the bread in her apron into roses. It was one of her saintly miracles. We all need our occasional miracles, don’t we, Mrs. Wall?”

“Miracles. Yes. I’ll definitely take a few.”

I wondered if Bienta thought of Lok as she studied the window each week at Mass. And what of the roses, Lok’s favorite flower? I would have loved to see the Owitas’ yard. I imagined it covered with roses.

“The yellow roses are quite beautiful,” Bienta said, as if she read my mind.

“They are,” I said. I waited, hoping she would mention her daughter.

Instead, Bienta and Giles said goodbye to me and I watched as she steered the car along Mount Vernon Road, toward the intersection. Bienta was no longer a theory or an abstraction, but a real person who drove a Neon and joined in the Communion line along with me. From now on, I would make it a point to look for her, sitting faithfully by her favorite saint, as I looked down from my seat in the choir loft.

A
s we moved into summer after that first spring, our valley suffered through a stretch of suffocating heat that lasted well into September. Rain was scarce, but it seemed that Giles didn’t need rain. Our yard continued to thrive in his gifted hands.

Giles had added more clients to his list and there were times when I might go a week or more without seeing him. If he arrived while I wasn’t at home, he usually left me a note in the mail slot, reporting on what he’d done. I sometimes paused, going out to the van, simply to turn around and take a good look at a home and yard I now felt proud of. Two large brown ceramic pots, chosen by Giles and Sarah, flanked the front door. They held a muted purple, trailing species of geranium, the first new
flowers I had agreed to. Giles was ecstatic to have won this little victory. Although I hadn’t admitted this to him, I saw he was right about bringing out the beauty “that already belongs to your compound.” With my consent, Giles had also planted three inkberry hollies we ordered through Sarah, for the space we tilled that day beside the backyard fence. The leaves were glossy, pleasing to the eye, with pinpoint, pure white flowers.

When the azaleas bloomed I had a change of heart and told Giles we would keep them “one more year, at least.”

As we strolled past them one humid afternoon, he said, “Their roots are deep, and they belong here.”

In just one season, Giles had transformed our yard. Wider mulch beds framed the front yard shrubbery. Our boxwoods gleamed. Our neighbors conveyed shocked approval as they peddled cautious compliments, saying things like, “Your yard looks nice. Your grass is spongier, it seems. That man who comes around—we’ve seen him up at Sarah’s house, too. Say, isn’t he that guy who sometimes works at Foodland? We’ve heard he’s good with growing things. Does he ever sleep?”

As June yielded to July, more neighbors ventured down the street to snag Giles for a curbside consultation. I could always spot them by their timid steps, or the blighted leaf or limp-looking blossom they cradled in their hands. “What do you think might be wrong?” they shyly asked Giles. Some even offered folded bills, offering to pay for his step-by-step instructions. But he declined to charge them for a moment’s conversation. One neighbor joked that his techniques should be patented.

The first time I heard a neighbor holding Dick and me out as models, I stifled a giggle. I could tell Dick was pleased, too. I noticed he used a jauntier step when mowing. He lingered in the process, boldly stepping off the limited dimensions of our yard and stabbing the mower extra times into the shadows underneath the shrubbery to make sure that even unseen blades were uniformly clipped. His legs moved with an energy once seen only in his headlong dash to the nearest driving range or putting green. By summer’s end, he sported a darker tan than usual.

Meanwhile, I suddenly became a weather-data addict. Checking the online forecast for our area was a soothing daily ritual. I developed a fondness for the local TV weather guy, who wore a bad toupee but used sexy terms like “warm front,” “Doppler radar,” and “relative humidity.” As August rolled around, I even bought a
Farmers’ Almanac
, leafing through it in the drugstore checkout line as if I were devouring a steamy romance novel. It was cozy, thinking of the bigger picture of a weather zone and how so many people were united by approaching systems no one could control. It was the most kinship I’d felt with my fellow man in many years.

Each Sunday, I looked for Bienta at church. After Mass, I usually tried to catch up with her by speed-walking toward her customary exit beside the baptismal font, but she eluded me every time. Dick suggested that maybe if I lingered beneath her favorite window, I might find her. But I had a feeling that I would never catch up with her, until and unless she wanted to be caught. I tried not dwelling on it but I couldn’t help worrying
that I’d done something to offend her, and it wasn’t in my nature not to worry over things.

A typical summer Sunday also included a drive from church to Heathwood Hearth—to honor my father and my mother. When I arrived for our weekly ice cream date, they were always waiting eagerly in the velvety-green parlor. I helped them up into Dick’s smaller four-door, and we drove through town looking at people’s yards.

To make conversation and to try to keep Daddy tethered to the moment, I’d sometimes ask him questions to jog his memory. “Remember how you used to write that newspaper column, Daddy, featuring prominent citizens of Radford?” (He said no.) “Remember how we used to measure snowfall with the handle of a broomstick, every winter?” (“Yes,” he answered. “I went sledding, and a little girl rode on my back.”)

At times like that a flush made its way up my mother’s cheeks. Though she might try to be stoic, her pale, freckled skin gave her away every time. I knew she wouldn’t cry—Mama rarely caved in to sentiment. She’d had a lot of practice, I supposed. Meanwhile, I struggled to hold back tears. It had never once occurred to me to ask Mama to try feeling her feelings instead of just passing them on to me as in a game of hot potato. I blotted a tear that spilled onto my cheek and streaked down the side of my face.

Daddy occasionally seemed to be on the verge of knowing things that he’d forgotten. I tried to reconcile the reflection of the stranger in my rearview mirror with the father I knew, the man who ministered to the struggling from behind the cash
register in his old hotel. Often he made small loans of money to the really hard up, knowing full well that they would never be paid back. Now he sat in the backseat of our car, fiddling with the child locks, gritting his teeth between heavy slurps of butter brickle ice cream and working on a theory of how it came to pass that I was driving him around.

On another Sunday afternoon, I drove my parents and their ice cream by my house when Giles was working in the yard. I called Giles over to the car to meet them and Daddy even managed to look a little pleasant, as if Giles were a regular at his hotel’s newsstand, purchasing a stack of magazines, some paperbacks, and a copy of
The Wall Street Journal
. My mother’s eyelids fluttered with evolving interest and approval as her gaze swept across the yard. She complimented Giles on his work. “My daughter speaks of you with high regard, and now I’m seeing why.”

It was the first time in many weeks that I’d seen her pursue a pleasant conversation with anyone. This was a positive development. But, on the minus side, her gait had begun to get wobblier and she had stumbled several times. I had made an appointment with her doctor, but it was still weeks away.

I shared my concerns with Giles one day after he and my parents had met. He mentioned that she might want to start using a cane. Then a few days later, he surprised me by bringing one from home, for me to give to my mother. It was carved from one piece of wood with figures of zebras, elephants, giraffes, and other exotic animals springing to life on the handle. Giles told
me that among Luos, each elder selected the style of his cane. The more intricate the cane, the higher the status of the elder in the community. This cane’s wood was from the Nile tulip tree.

I fingered the curve of the cane. “So wonderful,” I said, marveling over the animals that circled the handle with such liveliness. I thought how miraculous it would be if the animals’ graceful movements could be transferred to whoever used it. Once again, my English teacher’s knack for fantasy swept me off my feet and I shook myself back to reality.

“We can’t accept this lovely cane, Giles! It’s a work of art.”

“It is okay,” Giles answered me indulgently, as if speaking to a child. “Consider it a loan, and I will take it back someday. Better that it be used by a person of spiritual depth and upright character, someone exactly like your mother. I felt her kindness and her suffering as we spoke that day at your compound.”

“Did you, Giles?” I think I was even more grateful for his regard for my mother than I was for the generous loan of the cane.

I remembered hesitating as Giles held the cane toward me. Something in the transfer seemed ill-advised, though I had no words to explain the odd sensation, and it became another mystery I associated with him. There would come a time when I thought back on that moment as a foreshadowing. Were our future troubles lurking, even then? Or had I placed them there, in hindsight?