Closing the circles

By now, my garden contains peas, carrots, onions, beets, and three tomatoes. It is still almost a month before the first frost-free date, so the tomatoes really should not be out there, but my husband begged, because if they did not freeze, he would be able to have fresh tomatoes sooner. And three plants aren't going to make much difference. They are a non-heritage variety, Burpee long keepers, that I started in the house around the end of February. After they came up, they got transferred to my mom's greenhouse and forgotten about while she watered them, and they were big and leggy when she gave them back. Then I put them in the bottom halves of milk cartons that the previous tenants had left in the farm house (I am happy that they were soda and milk drinkers, because I rarely have large jug type containers) and sat them outside the garage door, to be brought in at night. And the first day they were out there, the wind blew so hard that they all wrapped around each other inside the storage tote I had them in and they tugged each other out by the roots, killing most of them. Oops. So I started more. Now I have about 20 Black Krim germinating in Dixie cups. And a few of my Beefsteaks lived through the trauma. Only about six Black Krim are up so far. I am hoping for a fabulous harvest of the juicy, purple-streaked beauties.

My mom has been coaching me through my planting. We can do that now. She has gardened in Western Kansas for years, unlike me, who has spent most of my adult life in the mountains extending my childhood, playing in the dirt on a mountain bike instead of growing things in it. I am her only kid, and it was a long eight years without me for her, I know. Three years ago, she found a lump in her left breast. For a year and a half, it grew as the specialist she went to poked it and assured her it was not cancerous. Then she decided to start demanding more testing. And was immediately diagnosed with breast cancer. How these things happen, we are not sure. It has shaken our faith in the medical profession. But with her sentinal lymph nodes already affected, there was little choice but to hit it with an arsenal, so she did. She opted to go through six months of chemo first, so her doctor would be able to tell if the tumors were reacting. They reacted well. Then she had a mastectomy on her left side, as well as a lumpectomy on her right side. Then six weeks of daily radiation, during which she lived in the patient housing adjacent to the Shaw Cancer Center in Edwards, Colorado, at the base of Beaver Creek Ski Resort. This was finally her time to relax, to do yoga and work out and read. It was possibly the first time in her life she had invested in herself. Later, she went back and had a mastectomy done on her right side, as well. Not only did she not want to monitor it for the rest of her life, I think the artist in her could not handle the asymmetry and discordant aesthetic of one real and one fake breast. Losing one had made her feel unwhole, chopped apart, like she was missing part of herself. Losing two did not double the feeling.

Since our experience with Grandpa, a diagnosis of stomach cancer two years after it had progressed to creating symptoms, his instantly recognizing how screwed he was and his resignation and rote actions of going through the motions of chemo, we always wondered what we would do if faced with a diagnosis like cancer. Would we go the holistic route? But when it happened, it was again so late and the terror was so high and we were unprepared and broke. That is the problem with holistic treatment. When your life is on the line and your bank account is empty, you do what your insurance company tells you to do. And it tells you to pump your body full of drugs administered by people in haz-mat protective gear. Then, after you are done being sick from chemo, you lie in a room under a machine operated by people standing behind walls so none of the radiation reaches them. You subject yourself to whatever effects anesthesia will have on you this time as your surgeons cut off part of your female identity and, if you or your significant other are still attached to your female identity, replace it with inflatable expanders that gouge into your muscle tissue. You stop juicing or drinking green tea or doing the things that might protect your cells during chemo because your healthcare providers warn you that these may also making your chemo less effective. And you think that if this does work, it might all be worth it in exchange for your life, but if it doesn't, it is idiotic that you are doing this.

But that is in the past. The only reminder of that nightmare is her fingernails and toenails that no longer grow clear and straight, the hot flashes and symptoms of menopause that the tamoxifen threw her into, and the objects on her chest that are no longer her breasts. She is angry about it and now that she can, ready to fight it. Her life will always have stress. I hate to see the way she is just sadly resigned to this fact. But now, it at least includes excellent nutrition as well. This actually started when the lump did, and may be responsible for the fact that it was able to grow for three years without spreading too far into the rest of her body.

I admit, after watching two of the people dearest to me fight cancer, one losing and one winning the fight, I am terrified of cancer. If new research comes out about cancer fighting super foods, I am all over it. I am on the wagon. It is my worst fear, getting that diagnosis. And it is not because I think I might die. I might fall out of the haymow or have a pulmonary embolism and die today. But it is the inconvenience of cancer that scares me. That was the source of my mom's anger as she spent a year fighting it. "I do not have the time or the patience to deal with this right now in my life", she kept repeating. And I feel the same way. There are things to do and places to go and if I'm going to live, I want to actually live, and not in fear that I am wasting my last good year on earth sitting in a chair with a tube into my artery. So I vow to never be that person.

If it is me, it will be crappy luck, not my own fault. Although at the moment, I find myself dealing with a range of angry emotions as I experience crappy luck- I do everything right, eat right, exercise, manage my stress, and all around me, people who eat crap and are overweight and live on diet coke get pregnant and keep their babies and if I can even manage to get pregnant, as I have done twice now, I can't manage to keep the pregnancy past seven weeks. And I have to keep telling myself that there is nothing I can do except keep doing what I am doing and accept that it is not my fault, it is just crappy luck.

My garden is a place to be alone and work through this stuff. I literally watered the peas I was planting with tears the other evening. I feel as though that will be a defining memory of this time for me, the sight of my hands down in the dirt and mud in front of me wavering through watery eyes as tears dripped off the end of my nose and splashed onto them. They were tears of frusteration and loneliness as I thought about yet another friend finding she is pregnant, bringing back the memory of the ecstasy of my last positive test, and the grief as all my happy plans bled out a few weeks later. It is not only all these years of hoping I could have a kid someday and finally being in a place to do it and then going through recurring miscarriages that has be crying in my garden dirt, it is the loneliness of seeing my friends experience motherhood together and me being left behind, the one who will be bumbling her way through being a first time mother when everyone else has kids in school. I say will, because we will eventually share our lives with a child. If not a biological one, an adopted one. It is my husband who wants so much to have our own. I wanted to adopt without even trying for a biological child, but some part of his biology thinks it needs to experience having his own DNA replicated. So we will wait and try again and again until it either works or it is obvious it most likely never will, for his sake. Which is part of the reason I am desperate for a distraction right now. I can't make myself busy enough. When I am planting, incubating chicks, building a space for my new flock of chickens, planning, doing schoolwork, laying the groundwork for the wellness center I want to start in town, I am leaving no room for a child. Which is exactly the kind of life I need right now- one in which there are no holes left to be filled. I can't leave room for wishing.

So in the absence of growing a human, I am all in with growing everything else I can get my hands on. If it grows, it needs to grow under my supervision. That is my compromise.

Recipe for a sustainable farm: (to be followed loosely and creatively and with whatever ingredients are at hand)

*1 garden, containing: leafy vegetables, root vegetables, and fruits (in my case, carrots, tomatoes, peppers, squash, potatoes, peas, kohlrabi, beets, eggplant, onions, spinach, lettuce, sweet corn, wheatgrass, strawberries, and in several years, rhubarb and asparagus.)
*5 hens (at least. Many more if possible) to eat bugs and poop fertilizer
*1 rooster (to act as the human's alarm clock as well as a sperm donor to keep flock replicating)
*2 humans to generate food waste to feed chickens
*Several thousand earthworms to keep garden soil healthy
*1 dog, to act as security system, provide companionship and use it's scent to keep coyotes and foxes from eating cats and chickens
*2 (or more) cats to control rodent population and to provide a moving obstacle course by winding around ankles, thus keeping humans agile and adaptable
*A community to share the joy with

Hopeful future ingredients to add to this mix:

*50 acres of wildflowers, pollinated by several colonies of bees to create both a healthy ecosystem and honey to eat and sell
*10+ goats to graze down the noxious weeds on the yard and allow a reduction in mowing, besides providing milk for those so inclined and for soap making (my neighbor's pet project)
*5-10 cattle to participate in a intensive guided grazing regimen in order to return health and balance to our pasture, grazing out the noxious weeds and allowing native grasses to return, to be processed at local butcher shop and marketed as organic grass fed beef, a growing niche market
*A peacock or two just because peacocks are awesome
*A duck or two, same reason
*A flock of guinea hens, because in spite of being possibly the second ugliest bird alive (after vultures), they are incredibly fun to watch and they eat things that other birds won't touch, such as Goatheads, the ugly little thorns that look like evil little horned heads and leave gaping holes in ones feet. Apparently a guinea's gullet is impervious to sharp thorns ripping through it.
*A water collection system for watering plants and providing a duck habitat
*A on-site sister in law in her own little moveable green smart house, living rent free and donating her time in exchange for food and company
*A community supported food delivery route to those unable to grow their own food but are willing to pay us to grow it for them, allowing us to finance our idyllic farm life.

I am loving being a step closer to that sustainable life. Someday, all the circles will close and I will be a happy child.