Greenhouse Apocalypse III

I was in town with Bill from dawn to 3 pm on January 31. It was famously cold, two below zero, and Jupiter, the crescent moon, and Venus were in perfect alignment in the southeast sky when I awoke. Color bled up from the horizon, tangerine into peacock into midnight blue, slowly fading to salmon to lilac to turquoise as the light came up. It was so beautiful I kept imploring Bill to look, but he was too sick to enjoy it. We were on our way to a full day’s chemo, and he wasn’t looking forward to it one bit.

We are watching him disappear, watching his body and his energy, his Bill-ness ebbing away, and it’s happening so fast we can’t even believe it from one day to the next. There’s nothing his doctor can do about it, either, but to keep slamming him with biweekly baths of poison to try to kill the cancer before it kills him. He’s lost fifty pounds. His pants fall off him now, but he doesn’t want to buy new ones. “Just more stuff to give to Goodwill,” he says. He doesn’t have any more belt holes to tighten.

I try to make him comfortable, but I can’t. I try to give him foods he’ll enjoy. I try to engage him in conversation, to redirect his thoughts to something other than his sorrow and dissolution and disillusionment, to all the things he has to give up, and all the things he believes he won’t get to experience. Which is everything. Everything. It is difficult. He is difficult. He doesn’t want to do any of this. He wants things the way they were. So do I, so do I, my love. I wish for a magic wand. I wish for anything good, however small. I scratch and search but everything I offer seems so meaningless. I’m not doing enough. Nobody can.

When his treatment was finally over, I brought him gently home, helped him get back into his pajamas and tucked him into bed for a nap at the pink house. I came back to the red house and when I stepped into the foyer it felt awfully cold. I checked the thermostat. It said 57. The vents were ice cold. I ran out the front door and around the side of the house and as I neared the greenhouse, I could see wilted geranium flowers, red as old blood, plastered up against the wall. Opened the door, and was hit in the face with the stink of dying green. It was 22 inside. Everything was dead. I gathered up an armload of small succulents that hadn’t yet wilted limp and brought them in the house, figuring they were just going to take longer to die than the thin-leaved ones, but maybe they were somehow still living.

 

Creole Lady, her leaves hanging limp as washcloths, standing 8’ tall, and  dead. The Path, her glorious golden red flower, blasted and dead, buds hanging straight down, her leaves dark bronze. This is my third such greenhouse freeze. I know this stench, I know this grief, I know the irreversibility of it all, and how it feels to lose beautiful things you’ve loved for years, without a whisper of warning.

  

  

I didn’t wail, didn’t weep. I just closed the door and went back into the house to try to figure out what to do. If the gas line was frozen at the wellhead, I was screwed, screwed, screwed. And, with the temperatures below zero, and the welljack jammed and inoperative for at least 2 ½ years, that was a highly likely scenario. It hadn’t pumped for two winters. The oil company doesn’t give a rat’s ass, either. They have all but abandoned this and many other shallow wells in the area, operating them on a skeleton crew. Who cares if people’s houses go cold? One by one, the welljacks jam up and quit pumping, and none of them get fixed. I’ve been told the natural pressure at the wellhead would keep me in gas. OK. I'd go through a second winter like this. But if it wasn’t frozen at the wellhead, if there was just some condensation in the line, brought out by the deep cold, then sudden bright sun, I could trip the regulator and have gas again. Too late for my greenhouse plants, but at least the ones in the house wouldn’t have to die, too. I wouldn’t lose the aquarium, the orchids, the pipes to this cruel freeze.

 I called my neighbor, Bob Harris. He told me to call the guy who tends the well. Jeff’s wife, who answered, was very sympathetic. She said he’d call me back, and he did. Oh yeah, he said, he’d seen the wellhead pressure fall to zero on my well around noon. (Oh, good. Thanks.) He told me to trip the regulator by the back door and I should get my gas back. While I was gathering tools to do that, Bob drove up in his white truck, honking. I thawed the frozen regulator cap with a Ziploc bag full of hot water, then unscrewed it. The regulator tripped with a hiss, and we were in business again. Bob and I re-lit the pilots on the big furnace, the water heater, and the small furnace. We re-lit the greenhouse heater. We made sure everything was working. I popped him a beer and we sat at the kitchen table and talked. I asked him about all the neighbors, and I told him some things he didn’t know about some of them. He told me more about Gary, who ate pileated woodpeckers and pretty much all the squirrels for miles around. About what it looked like inside that white farmhouse the day Gary died, the bottles and cans in piles.

I wondered why we’d never done this, sat down at the kitchen table and talked. It was because in 25 years, I’d never asked him for help. I’d asked him not to mow his milkweed, and he’d been happy to help with that.  He’d been so nice about it, too. Now I needed real help. I have no one now who can take over when I’m too rattled to think straight. No one to lean on, no one in charge but me. So I call my neighbor, and he comes over and helps me, and he says he will do that any time. That’s good, that’s money in the bank. And Lord knows if there was anything I could do for him and Debbie and Sam, I’d be there. Imagine, feeling community after 25 years. It takes awhile when you think you have it all figured out, when you think you've got this. And then you realize you don’t, and you are unequivocally alone, and nothing about that is going to change. You pick up the phone and call, and he’s there ten minutes later, in your driveway. What a feeling.

I called Phoebe and told her everything in the greenhouse was dead. She said she remembered the first time it happened when she was quite young, coming in and seeing me in a fetal position on the bedroom floor, crying and crying. And she thought, “Well, she still has me and Liam.” I felt a rush of shame, that I’d let her see me cry over some flowers. That she’d had to have that thought. That it seemed to her that flowers mattered more to me than she and her brother did. It sure looked that way to a child. If anything, this is a time for facing hard truths and bad behavior, for telling the truth to each other. 

That wailing woman was the old me, the one with the luxury of crying over dead geraniums. That was the one who hadn’t seen real loss yet. I cried a lot the second time, it froze too, in November 2013. But I cried for all that was happening around me, things I couldn't reconcile or control. I referred to it as Greenhouse Apocalypse, the plants a metaphor for a far greater loss.

I met this third freeze with a different face. For this event, I had nothing left but numb resolve. Face it, they’re all dead. Let’s see about getting some heat in the house, or I die, too. I told myself I didn’t care about a bunch of plants. They were just things, after all. I don’t have cancer. There’s that. And for awhile I didn’t feel anything. I made myself a nice dinner, knowing that would help. I wondered at my steely calm as I ate in the silence of the evening. It frightened me. Was my soul frozen, gone? It started to hurt about six hours later, after dark, about the time I'd usually go down to open the door and say, "Hello, Ladies!", to stand under the soft multi-colored twinkle lights and look at the lush flowers in half-darkness. I figured I'd better check in with someone, so I called Shila, left a message and she called me back. I told her what had happened today. And there was something about her shock and anguish that broke through the ice on my heart. “I am a little…sad about it,” I stammered, and my voice broke. Yeah. That's it. I’m a little sad.

My reactions, I realized with a sinking feeling, are those of a dog who has been kicked so many times it no longer thinks that’s anything unusual. It’s just what happens. With everything that’s happening to Bill, I’m abashed to feel sad about a bunch of plants. Just another kick. So what. I don’t want to go down that path, of weeping. There is too much far more worth weeping about. I haven't even been able to cry about him—there’s too much to do yet to try to help him. What good would crying do? I moved through the house like a robot, got ready for bed, slept two hours, and awoke to begin the grieving.

For Creole Lady, with the Hawaiian sunset in every blossom.

Same flower, before and after freeze. Ain't it grand.

 

 The Path, like a fire burning, lighting the way...to what? 

 

        

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What 21 degrees does to a tropical hibiscus. Same flower, below.  

 

That hybrid balcony geranium that just wouldn’t stop blooming for anything. The willow leaved fig, 8 years in bonsai training, almost a yard tall, magnificent with its great coil of roots, now black, dead.

  

That giant rosebud geranium smuggled as a cutting from Ecuador, just coming into bloom almost two years later, dead now. All the fuchsias, all the Happy Thought geraniums, my very favorites, all thinking about blooming. All dead. The day before, I had just shown my “woman cave” to Geoff and Paco and Ben, taken their picture posing with the two enormous hibiscus trees I loved so much. I remember telling them the trees were too big for me to move now, so I hoped it wouldn’t freeze up this winter. But I’d known all along that it would.

 

  

 

The gas line would freeze again this year. I'd lose everything, and I knew it. So in early December, I decided to make a plant ark. I went through the greenhouse, gathering up one specimen of each plant that I’d be heartbroken to lose: the pink fuchsia called "Trandshen Bonstedt;" the plectranthus "Cerveza ‘n’ Lime" from Donna; an impala lily seedling; the chartreuse-leaved geranium called "Happy Thought." One dwarf pomegranate seedling. The yellow kalanchoe that makes me happy. A begonia called Jurassic Watermelon. A painstakingly rooted cutting of the willow-leaved fig bonsai, only three inches tall. I took cuttings of geraniums Vancouver Centennial and Rosina Read, gathered them up and brought them into the house, to grow on the windowsills, where they wouldn’t die instantly when the gas went off. I made a genetic bank, taking just enough DNA to get me through when everything had to die. 

I even bought a heat mat and got an old fishtank and made great plans to take cuttings of Creole Lady and The Path. Bottom heat is the only way to root those, I'd decided, having failed at it for years. I was going to do it as soon as I could get some cuttings without flower buds. I’d wait, let them bloom first. I needed every flower so badly. And then on December 16 Bill was diagnosed, and later that week I carried the fishtank and the heat mat to the basement, because I suddenly no longer cared to try to start anything. It was more than I could do just to be present, to help.

But I kept my little ark of treasured plant starts in the main house, and I watered them faithfully, and they began to grow nicely. So I haven’t lost everything. I have the genetic material for some of my favorite plants, right here. I had taken out a little insurance. The big hibiscus I loved so much are dead. I can’t escape to the warm, softly lit greenhouse any more. I'm not putting anything back in there, no way. So what. I’m a little sad. But I don’t have cancer.

 Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation  can that which is indestructible in us be found. 

 Pema Chödron

 January 31, 2019