The Real Dirt
My parents on their wedding day.
Chapter 10
The garden with the yellow mums was just the beginning. During the next few years, our yard was transformed into a mini-botanical garden.
My mom’s second garden was more a product of necessity. It was a couple years after she planted her mums, and my parents had recently built an addition onto the back of our house, expanding what was a way-too-small family room. The project also included the construction of a new patio, directly behind our garage.
When construction was near completion, the area adjacent to the new patio was a war zone. The grass was a disaster, filled with tire ruts, construction debris, and an assortment of trash.
“Don’t worry about it,” my mom said to our contractor, Ed, after he apologized to her for the unplanned mess around the new patio. “Tell you what. If a couple of your guys could help me, let’s just clean it up, dig up what little grass is left, rake it, and I’ll plant a nice, big garden.”
A garden. That’s what she saw.
This area had a lot of wood lying in it. Broken bricks. Rocks.
Still, she saw a garden. A big one. Each side of the patio was a good twenty feet long. But within a couple of hours, Ed’s guys had the area picked up and raked, the holes filled, and ready for plants.
And soon enough, my mom and I were at the local garden store to load up on plants. Keep in mind my mom had no practical knowledge about plants. She understood some liked sun and some liked shade. But that was really about the extent of her horticultural proficiency.
She had nothing particular in mind when we walked into the big humid greenhouse. She simply wanted lots of different flowers. She wanted color. As we strolled through the long aisles, she’d stop every so often to pick up a plant. She’d hold it with two hands, arms stretched out. She’d smell them. She’d smile at them. Some she picked. Some she didn’t. I don’t know why she chose the ones she did. I’m not sure she knew, either. I guess she simply followed her heart.
After we arrived home, we carried all of the plants to the new patio. It was the first time we could see all of our selections at once. We had a rainbow of color. And we also had what looked like a few hundred plants to get in the ground.
“What in the world are you doing?” came a voice from the garage. It was my dad. He had arrived home from work, and had obviously just got his first glimpse of us standing on the patio admiring our purchases.
Then began the bantering so typical between Mom and Dad.
“Hi! We’re going to plant a garden!” answered my mom.
“Are you nuts? Do you realize how big that area is? Why don’t we just put the grass back in?”
“We’ve got plenty of grass in our yard. We need some color out here.”
“I think you’re biting off more than you should. I think we should put grass in half of it.”
“Well, we already bought all of the flowers. But if you want to make part of this grass, that’s fine. I’ll find a different spot in the backyard to put in another garden for the things that won’t fit in here.”
Amazing. My mom always could find the right words to say—in any situation. Never one to back down, she’d usually find a way to win through kindness. Gentleness. Or through words that were inarguable. I’m not sure I ever saw her persuasiveness lose.
“Fine,” replied my dad. “If you want to plant them all here, go right ahead. But don’t look to me when you’re sick and tired of taking care of everything!”
With that, my dad shook his head and went into the house. The conversation was over. And my mom was the happy victor.
She smiled.
“OK, Jimmy, let’s get working!”
My mom had no real approach to planting. She just started in. I, on the other hand, had to think out everything first. I had the plan; she had the spirit. We were a good team.
Our new garden had an abundance of flowers. Pink, yellow, orange, red, purple, white. Big flowers, fluffy flowers, delicate flowers, spiky flowers. We had a little bit of everything.
We finished planting the garden that night—long after the sun had set—under the faint light coming from a fixture near the back door of the garage.
We were covered with dirt. Our hands. Our faces. Our knees. Our clothes.
“We have such good soil here,” my mom said to me. Then she proceeded to tell me about farming, about farmers, about her childhood relatives in central Nebraska and Iowa who farmed. She told me what soil was like in other parts of the country. She said it could be like clay. My mom could talk for a good fifteen minutes on any topic—including soil.
And, as usual, she wanted to make a point.
We had good soil under us.
Picking the actual date for my surgery wasn’t quite as easy as I expected it to be.
After I finished my consultation with my doctor in his office, our only remaining business was to get surgery scheduled.
“Let’s go up to the front desk to see when I have some slots open in the next month,” he said.
I’m not exactly sure what I was expecting, but it was more than I got at the front desk. Alright, I guess deep down I thought I was suddenly very important and everyone involved in my upcoming surgery would now treat me kind of like a celebrity. I mean, come on, this was big!
“Where’s the surgery calendar?” my doctor asked the front desk attendant.
“Don’t ask me Dr. B, you had it last!” she shouted back.
They couldn’t find the surgery calendar. This was not going well. So then my doctor pulled out a blank calendar he found on the front desk. It was a freebie from a pharmaceutical company. There was nothing on it. He proceeded then, to pencil in what he thought were his blackout dates over the next month.
“I’m on vacation this week. Oh yeah, isn’t that conference on the eighteenth or nineteenth?”
My God! I thought. How can he be talking about time off!
After a minute or two of mental gymnastics on his part, he threw out four dates.
One was the following week. “Too soon,” I said.
Two of the dates were three weeks out.
“Maybe,” I said.
And one was a month away, May 26.
One would think I would be standing there prepared to say, “Hey, let’s march over to the hospital right now. I’ll strip down. You slice me open and cut until it’s all gone.”
I was weighing so many things. Work. Family. My own mental state. Secretly, I also wanted to attend something at our church I had been working on for a couple of weeks. It was nothing more than a big, parish-wide party. But I wanted to be there.
Joining this group—and agreeing to play a leadership role in it—was one of the many things I have done in my life where I simply followed my heart. I didn’t really have the time to get involved with it. But my heart said yes. This was going to be a great party. A blue-ribbon celebration. And it had become a central part of my world in recent weeks.
I stood there in the doctor’s office. I knew I had cancer, and I wanted it out of me. But I also had this very strong, conflicting feeling.
“Would I be crazy to wait until May 26?” I asked. “Would that be too big of a risk?”
He assured me waiting a month was not a problem.
“Put it in ink then,” I told him. “May 26 it is.”
The party became my distraction over the following weeks. Our planning committee had countless meetings, many of them at 6:00 am on Saturdays at a local Denny’s restaurant. I carried notebooks and files with me every waking minute so I could write down new ideas or plans. The details of the party consumed any time that wasn’t spent thinking about the heaviness of cancer, surgery, and recovery.
The setup for the party started the day before the event. I love the bonding that takes place at moments like this. All of the planning and dreaming starts to evolve into realities. People magically show up to help.
But there also can come a time when there are too many “chefs” in the kitchen. That point had arrived, and I had no interest in getting involved. My work was done; I was ready for fun.
Barry, one of the other organizers of the event, felt the same way I did.
“You feel like getting out of here and pulling some weeds by the main entrance?” he asked me.
The weather was great outside. I looked at the chaos going on inside. Being outside sounded perfect. Weeding sounded perfect.
So, in the middle of all of this, Barry and I slipped away from the high-flying energy inside to work on something neither of us had ever considered. We started pulling weeds from the landscaped beds that flanked the sidewalk leading up to the church’s main door.
And there were a LOT of weeds to pull, which gave us time to talk about a variety of topics.
We talked about our mutual excitement. We talked about how great it was to see people involved. We talked about a few minor things we would like to change. We talked about kids. Work. Life. Barry’s beloved White Sox.
“Wouldn’t it be awesome to surprise people with a bunch of bright red geraniums out here?” Barry said to me. Red was the official color of the party.
I had actually been thinking the exact, same thing.
“Let’s do it! Great idea!” I said to him. And within an hour, we had made a round-trip excursion to our local hardware store to buy several flats of bright red geraniums.
Our party was now less than twenty-four hours away. Still faced with what seemed to be a list of endless tasks to accomplish, volunteers were starting to get frazzled. Yet Barry and I were quite content outside planting red geraniums.
Barry hollered over to ask me if I needed his spade.
Despite the rawness of the cold soil under my fingernails, which was intense, I shouted back, “No, the soil’s actually pretty easy to work with. I’m surprised.”
I sat there, kneeling on the hard concrete sidewalk. Barry was talking, but his words no longer registered with me. I was, once again, thinking about the events of the last several weeks. I replayed conversations. I remembered lines from e-mails and notes. I thought about my family.
I looked at my hands and was deeply aware of how alive I was. My senses were on overdrive.
And while I had spent weeks planning and working on this big, fun celebration, I knew what I would remember from the entire event was this one moment with Barry. Feeling dirt embedded under my fingernails.
I also thought of my mom and her lecture about soil.
Sure enough, she was right. We had good soil under us.