July 20, 2022

 

“To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.” -Audrey Hepburn

 

Yesterday I picked the first harvest from my deck container garden - a handful of shishito peppers. I got a late start on my garden this year but am amazed that I even have a garden after all that has happened this spring and summer. I looked at the fresh peppers in my hand and thought of Scott. How I wished that he could be there to share them with me. He loved shishito peppers and wanted several plants so we would have lots of them to eat.

Neither Scott nor I were adept at gardening. In the spring of 2020, we started it as a pandemic hobby with a hot paper lantern pepper seedling that produced many glossy bright red/orange peppers that summer. It's weird to describe a plant as charismatic, but we both agreed that somehow it was. The peppers were deliciously spicy and fruity and Scott learned how to make a fermented hot sauce with them. He was so proud and happy the day he made his first batch. He loved that plant and we successfully overwintered it and it produced even more peppers the second year; every branch was loaded with them.

In the spring of 2021, Scott was diagnosed with metastatic cancer and we learned that he needed surgery to insert a rod into his right femur to stabilize it due to bone metastasis. The news stunned all of us; at the time Scott had no symptoms other than a sore shoulder. While he was in the hospital for his orthopedic surgery, I was not allowed to see him for 3 days due to COVID. I spent those days planting roses that I had ordered earlier in the winter, back when my biggest problem was figuring out which show to stream that both Scott and I would want to watch. A friend expressed surprise that I would be able to plant roses during that time, but it was my way of coping with the situation. I needed something to do, and I needed to believe that the roses would bloom and that Scott would get to see them (which he did). 

After the great success of the hot paper lantern pepper the previous year, Scott and I had also ordered several tomato and pepper plants from the Burpee catalog, before we knew he had cancer. The seedlings arrived after the diagnosis, and I planted them in the hope that Scott would be able to see them grow. In a way that garden represented a wish that Scott would be there to enjoy its fruits. My Mom and Aunt Nancy came to visit us around that time, and the garden flourished under their care amid the droning of the Brood X cicadas that summer.

We tried to overwinter the hot paper lantern pepper plant again, but despite all our efforts, its leaves fell off and the plant dried up and died in the second winter. Both Scott and I mourned the loss of the plant. Scott was upset about losing his favorite plant, and I was upset about losing something that had brought Scott joy. Thankfully I had saved some seeds from the peppers. I had never sprouted seeds before and wasn't sure if it would come to anything, but I was able to sprout them and put the seedlings under a grow light in the basement.

In the spring of 2022, Scott went to the hospital and never came home. I stayed at the hospital and hospice with him for 3 weeks. During that time I went home for a few hours every other day to take a shower and get fresh clothes. I gave Scott updates on the garden and told him that the hydrangeas and roses had formed many buds, and the clematis was beginning to bloom. Scott enjoyed the garden reports; they made him feel like he was back home with me. 

After Scott passed away, I returned home in a haze and stayed that way for the next few weeks. Eventually I saw the seedlings in the basement and wondered if it was worth planting them. Scott was no longer there to share in the joy of watching them grow. Everything felt a little pointless. But I felt that Scott would have wanted me to do it, and by that time I had started to view gardening as therapeutic. Two of the hot paper lantern plants I sprouted from seed grew quickly and now have baby peppers growing on them, so Scott's plant will live on, in a new way.

My future is uncertain, but the garden still feels like an exercise in hope, that there is something in the future worth working toward. I don't know if I'll feel up to it every year, but for now I will try to enjoy the garden and keep it going as best I can.