Chemo Camp: Cut, then Come Again

My friends have been filling my house with flowers these past weeks. Bright zinnias and black-eye Susans from their gardens, pink roses and white hydrangeas for the hall table. As they fade I remove the dying and combine the living, creating new arrangements for new places in the house. 

I love bringing the outside in on these hot days of late summer, when very little grows in my yard at all. My mother did this all of my childhood, cutting flowers from her garden patch and setting them on the kitchen table, in the family room, beside the bed when we would visit.

At 91, she still keeps a small garden in the back of her patio home filled with plants she moved from home. Large pink peonies grace her kitchen table in the spring, and in summer, shasta daisies crop up on the kitchen counter. She can throw a Gerbera daisy from the grocery store into a corner of the garden and it will bloom all summer. 

She tried to give me mint she’d dug up from the back yard at home, but it died in my care. Iris bulbs? The same. But her little corner garden bursts with color, as it has all my life.

I love fresh cut flowers, too, but in recent years I’ve had very little luck in growing them. The peonies that pop in spring in my back yard my mother gave me as bulbs. They took years to bloom yet have somehow survived — and thrived — on my own benign neglect. My husband and I have over the years tried to fill our borders with perennials that require little care, but the voles and rabbits keep feasting on them. So we plant, they feast and we replace.

Just after my diagnosis this spring, I found some zinnia seeds I’d bought, maybe last year? I can’t remember. The kids and I used to plant a cutting garden along the side of the house each spring that actually grew into something, but that project fell by the wayside over the years. Each year I’d buy seeds and daffodil bulbs in bulk but the best I could do, it seems, was to plant a tomato plant or two and fill my porch pots with caladiums.

But I found these seeds. Looking at them and thinking what lay ahead of me, I wanted desperately to put something in the ground that would soon pop up its head and grow into something tall and beautiful. I can’t explain it, really, but despite the fact that it was pretty late in the growing season, I handed it over to my newly-retired and resident gardener, and he didn’t look at me like I was crazy. 

Instead, he set to work, scattering the seeds between the tomato plants I’d not quite successfully plugged in the ground and the leaves of my spent peonies.

Over the weeks, he watered and mulched, weeded and trimmed, even going way into the back yard to the abandoned compost pile he’d forgotten years before. I’d come home from work, and he’d be out there shoveling and watering (our water bill was more than $200 last month) working with this tiny plot.

Within a week, he’d coaxed the seeds to bloom, and so, in time, I picked a few and brought them into the house, bringing new life into this place where my own is being zapped out of me, bit by bit.

Then came my birthday, and let me tell you it was a virtual florist in my house. I must have had a half dozen arrangements scattered around the house — from the Farmer’s Market, from gardens around, a couple from the florist and one from the church altar. It was glorious, all the summer color splattered everywhere. 

And then I went to the doctor for chemo. 

My white count was low, they said, so they gave me a week off. I didn’t want that, mind you. Chemotherapy is not something you look forward to until you can’t have it. One week off is another added on to the end of treatment. So they began to question why. As they looked at my diet and my resting and my working and everything else you have to consider when you are in the middle of treatment, one of the nurses asked, as an aside: Do you have any live plants in the house? Any flowers?

It had been my birthday, I told her. And though I usually don’t get flowers even from the husband on the birthday, yes, I did have, well, a few. 

Get them out, she said. 

Why? I asked.

The spores, she said. They cause infection, she said. Which can land somebody like me in the hospital, she said. Which would be bad. Very bad.

All that beauty. All the love people had showered me with in bringing life into my house. Just a few flowers, really, but something growing and beautiful and hopeful right at the very moment when I needed it. That hope.

I handed the vases to my husband, one by one, and told him to toss them. And I hated it.

In the early mornings since, I walk outside to my zinnia bed, eyeing it with love and with trepidation. I don’t think I’ll look at fresh cut flowers the same way, ever again.

Zinnias are my favorite summer flower. The hydrangeas have rusted, the bachelor’s buttons have long-since dried up and roses, well, I’ve never been able to grow them. But zinnias? You toss the seeds and almost from nothing they pop their heads up, and the more you cut them, the more they come back. 

Each morning my husband tends our small spray of flowers as if it were an acre, snipping and mulching and musing over them like he did the children when they lived under our roof. She’ll be back, I can imagine him telling them, a reminder for himself, too, on those days lately, when neither of us wants to spend time with me. 

Yes, I will be back, but it will be awhile yet. Christmas, they tell me now, before all is well and good again. The zinnias — and all my garden flowers — will be long gone.

But here’s the thing about flowers. Some, if left to themselves, will dry and reseed without my having to do anything to help them. 

I’m counting on that. For my tiny zinnia garden and for myself. New growth, come spring, for all of us.