Nothing Like Peach Blossoms in February

Rebecca D. Martin

The place where we stayed, a small, renovated farmhand’s lodging a few yards from the big house, was surrounded by gardens, but what I recall was standing in the Chesapeake Bay shallows just a few miles down the road. The shore foam swirled around my ankles as I held a narrow Styrofoam tray in my left hand and a fish taco in my right, and bit into my upper lip so deeply my whole body fell apart, and apart, and apart, for the entire week that followed, and beyond.

“The attractions, fascinations there are in sea and shore!” Walt Whitman exclaims. “That spread of waves and gray-white beach, salt, monotonous, senseless . . . so indescribably / comforting.” I’ve never gone to the beach for sun and warmth. Each year, I come to a specific slice of Virginia’s Eastern Shore for the same sort of immersion in nature, that ebb and flow of thought and feeling, shaking itself out like a sheet and smoothing the wrinkles, patterned so peacefully after the predictable tides. I do not come to be trapped inside the house or racked with pain.

On that fateful day at the edge of the water, I had grown hot under our tent in the sun and shouted, “Be back soon,” to my husband in the deeps. The shambling, two-story pub on the corner of downtown was only two blocks away, walkable, but the day was hot. I hopped in our van, and with the air conditioning blasting, I navigated to a parking place on a shady side street. Ten minutes later, iced tea, crab bisque, and fish tacos in hand, I drove back to join my family. I’d eat my lunch with my feet in the water; why not? Lord, but it was hot. By the time I was back in the sand, I was sweltering again, and more than a little dizzy, the couple minutes of air-conditioned reprieve forgotten. I held up my soft-shelled taco in a mock toast to my husband farther out in the knee-deep tide, gazed at the heat-hazed horizon, and bit.

The preceding year had held all sorts of difficulties–warning signs as I see them now. Little traumas building up to the big one. My oldest went to Kindergarten, a place that did not see or shelter her, did not provide for her own particular needs–at least not in the way I thought it should. On my way out the door to attend a parent-teacher conference in August, I fell down our front porch stairs and chipped a tiny triangle of bone off the head of my left foot’s heel, missing the school meeting for a visit to the E.R. and spending the next few weeks cast-plastered and prone. In January, after a particularly difficult individualized education meeting, I fell into a panic attack that lasted days. The following month, shingles flared fiery on my stomach and back. I’d turned forty the year before, and I cried till I laughed, humorlessly, about the physical burdens middle age insisted on making me bear.

After those challenging months, I looked forward to the restorative peace of our beach vacation. Instead, I inextricably bit my lip eating a fish taco and spent most of that trip confined to the leather reclining sofa in our rented cottage, brain-fogged and body-bound, crying into my morning tea and lunchtime coffee because I wasn’t able to join my family at the shore. I spent much of the time plagued by guilt and self-recriminations. Surely my husband felt resentful that he had to shoulder the bags and the chairs and the cooler and the tent, not to mention the solo burden of constant vigilance while our very young children ventured into the waves. Surely my children would begin to believe that I didn’t care to be with them. Surely my body’s sudden swimminess, with its mind fatigue and waves of nausea, were my fault. Surely I could fix whatever had gone wrong.

My husband and children were twenty minutes down the road, playing in the water, watching the pelicans and gulls and sighting dolphins. I was stuck in this place, but I was still surrounded by beauty, wasn’t I? The guest house was tucked into the middle of a farm with fields and horses and intermittent flowers, and just outside the kitchenette window were raised garden beds. We were planning to build raised beds of our own, a return to the year or two of gardening I had put in before our children were born. I asked the owner to give me a tour.

I learned a lot from her, but as we meandered around the nooks and crannies of the property, I nursed a growing anxiety, not in my brain, but in my body. Exposed as I was out there in the shadeless conditions in which the cucumbers and cut flowers thrived, the sun chased me down, and its heat seemed to expand inside of me in such a way that my sanity started to melt away. I nodded appreciatively at the last patch of flowers, then raced inside for a cool shower and a handful of ibuprofen for my pounding head. Something was very wrong. A year’s worth of testing would confirm the fact: that bite into my upper lip in the heat of the sun and the exhaustion of a day at the beach had intensified a cardiovascular condition I’d long had, but never identified. Now, in middle age, the body that housed me needed to collapse in on itself.

*

We did build a garden for ourselves the following spring. That small square of space in the yard behind our house became a foyer onto the natural world. Its four walls, composed of deer fencing and chicken wire, allowed us a clear view down the long length of green grass and into the trail-blazed back woods. When I visit the garden, walking the narrow length of its pathways, fourteen feet by fourteen feet of black landscape fabric stretched between two long raised beds, I press my feet into the ground as I utter a kind of surprised reverence with each step. My garden, mine… Mine, my garden.

Despite my awe of the garden, I have to admit that I’m no expert. A gardening friend who is several years beyond me in experience points out that if you’ve been gardening for ten years, you’ve only done it ten times. It takes lots of practice, trial and error and accidental success, to accumulate the practical knowledge needed to plant the right seeds at the right times. You can experiment - you must experiment - but you only get one try. Then you pack it up for the winter and let the ground lie fallow till next spring.

By the end of the following summer, I finally received a referral to a local cardiologist, who after further testing, and despite inconclusive results, found a name for this sideways body experience that had begun at the shore: Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, or POTS.

The symptoms themselves—leaden legs, shortness of breath, and dizziness, followed by heavy sweat and a prickling sensation—I can only describe as body-panic. Then, after the initial onslaught, extreme fatigue sets in, all exacerbated in the heat. Which is to say, if I eat and drink and sleep and exercise well in winter, I almost forget I have this thing. But during the hot season, I approach my body the same way I’m learning to approach the garden: intentional spring-time planning as the new year’s season progresses toward warmer weather and a ready eye toward expected hardship and surprising outcomes.

*

In her strange, stunning meditation Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard suggests that each day is a god, different from the one before and the one that comes next, unpredictable, unreliable. For me, it’s the summers that change from one to the next, now beneficent in one way, now painful in another. Now offering up hosts of rainbow zinnias, now eking out only skinny, pocked plants or bright flower petals with dried edges.

I plant and tend my garden not for the satisfaction of production, but for the same reason I return to the shore: that connection with the natural world. I fill my lungs and release the breath of my life into the soil, which in turn packs so densely under my fingernails that my hands look like those of a Dickensian street waif all season long. To see more clearly. To remember there is more. These are the mantras I tell myself when the black cherry tomatoes that had overflowed from large harvest bowls last year seem ready, this July, to give up the ghost before they’ve even begun.

Poet friends Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Ross Gay, both gardeners, once held a year-long mail correspondence in garden-centric verse. This epistolary foray into their own growing spaces has since been published as the chapbook Lace & Pyrite, and in the introduction, Nezhukumatathil understands the inseparability of frustration and reward, the combined “pleasure and anxiety of tending these gardens -- which is to say, tending to ourselves, our relationships, our earth.” Her words acknowledge all the things we want from this space we’ve created and the ambivalence it often gives back: “There’s bounty, yes; but there’s loss and sorrow, too: like a garden, like a life.”

It is Ross Gay’s poems that have a line into my heart, though, especially his Autumn and Winter verse. Nezhukumatathil glories in the “full summer bloom,” but Gay hears the autumn maple “spindly / and creaking in the wind” and sees how the “glaze of ice made all the bones of [his] garden shine.” I shine in winter, too, in the cardiovascular-friendly cold. But even in the invigorating chill, hints of wrongness surface, as when Gay acknowledges, “Nothing like peach blossoms in February to tell you / something’s off.” Nothing like a pounding, swimming head to suggest that all is not well in the landscape of my own bones - or veins.

*

I venture out on another vacation to visit the farm my sister-in-law and her husband have been building. The last time we were out at this place in summer, my oldest daughter was five years younger, and she bounded after her slightly older cousin like only a Kindergartener can, through grass and around trees and along the edges of fence railing, as sheep looked on with little semblance of interest. The layout of the farm and gardens has been reconfigured since then, growing into a sustainable, sustaining operation. This is a life I cannot have because of my body’s limits, a thing I cannot do.

The distance between my in-law’s Vermont home, where we’re staying, and this New Hampshire farm is a forty-minute drive through green mountains, past blue-and-slate rushing rivers. The sun is out after what feels like a week of rain. I comment to my husband how many houses along this rural way are surrounded by wildflowers, how many people have planted pollinator gardens. Gazing out the passenger window, I contend with both envy and appreciation.

When we arrive, there are many animals to greet, including the pet rabbit immediately adjacent to where we’ve parked our car. One of the cousins introduces my girls to the newly hatched chicks, and my youngest cups a brown-and-gold striped ball of fluff in her hands, its tiny triangle wings the size of grasshopper clips. My sister-in-law offers us options: inside for watermelon and water, snow peas fresh from the garden? More time with the baby birds? Or a walk up the hill to see the rest of the place? “A walk,” I say, ready to stretch my legs from the drive, ready to see this portion of my family’s dream becoming reality.

The day is sunny, but also New England-summer cool: low seventies and dry, and the walk up the rise, is beautiful. In this moment, following my family, here is a very good place to be. We keep going up. Does anyone else notice that we’re on a slow but steady incline? My legs grow heavy. This is the point at which I would have reminded myself years ago how out of shape I am. I pause for a moment in the next spread of shade, waiting for a lightening of limb before I emerge into the sun-drenched field at the path’s edge. Everyone is ahead of me now. “You go ahead; I’m just breathing a minute,” I smile and usher them on.

My niece picks a green stem bearing tendrils of minute, round leaves, a beautiful weed. “In the spring,” she tells me, “this field is full of them.” Throwing her arms wide, she cries, “the smell is amazing!”

“That’s right,” my sister-in-law joins in. “I used to dislike the wild roses,” she adds, explaining that they’re invasive, which I’ve never thought about before. “But the wind brings the scent down to the house. How can I complain?”

I close my eyes, breathing deeply, and can imagine this field in such glory. We move on, up and see a larger stand of trees, more dense than earlier, tipping toward the idea of woods. Down, gloriously down a strip of soft, exposed soil descending at an angle that’s just short of the danger of slipping, sliding feet. My legs lighten; my lungs expand; for a moment, I might stride like a giant across the next field. The vista beyond the edge of the trees’ shade is as lovely as the rest has been: high blue sky with round, white summer clouds, like in a movie. I pause to snap a picture on my phone while my family is far ahead of me now at the new sheep-pen.

I emerge into the sun, and the heat along with the almost imperceptible rise of the ground again hit my legs like a ton of bricks. I lift them forcibly and plod along slowly. I ooh-and-aah and laugh for a minute at my children as they reach their hands through the fence and touch the noses of a crowd of very loud sheep. But then a familiar prickling sensation creeps up my back, along my shoulders and neck. “POTS,” I whisper to my husband with a quiet urgency before heading steadily back to the tree line. The girls join me in the trees, and my teenage nephew carries a lamb over on his shoulder for us to meet.

Although it is better, infinitely better, here out of the glaring face of the sun, something has begun that must now run its course. The recuperation I need—water, a chair, cool air, is waiting in the farmhouse kitchen. Thankfully, the way back is down, but there’s even more sun than I remembered. Not truly understanding the urgency of the situation, my sister-in-law offers a side-trail to a particularly gorgeous view, “If I’m up for it.”

How to answer that question when my heart says Yes! This is my chance to see something even lovelier than this patch of world I’ve just now been walking through. But No, I can’t. I physically can’t if I want any amount of that personal connection I came for, sitting around the kitchen table with what will turn out to be glass after glass of cold water before I feel close to normal again. I am sad, so sad, to say “Not this time.” Though I am getting better at pushing away the lurking sense of shame, of self-apology, I haven’t yet grown into an ability to fully not worry what anyone around me thinks of my incapacities. Am I so out of shape? I wonder if they wonder. Do I not care about nature? Or beauty?

I have found ways to explain POTS so anyone with me will understand that not being able to walk that extra trail is neither my preference nor my fault, that it isn’t some moral failing. I have also discovered more self-compassion for the debilitating symptoms that overtake my body. But at other times, all I feel is frustration and sadness.

*

At bedtime on this Vermont visit, I’ve been reading poet Molly McCully Brown’s essay collection Places I’ve Taken My Body. McCully Brown talks about her experience in a body with Cerebral Palsy—“which is a little like a stroke that happens when you’re born,” she gets used to explaining to people, wishing she didn’t have to. She talks about how, at times, her body can mask itself. She realizes that, sitting at a table in a bar, any other patron might imagine she’s just a pretty young woman in a typical body, reading a book, drinking a bourbon. But walking back over to where she parked her mobility scooter, her unusual gait gives her away. She takes her body, and her disability, with her wherever she goes.

“Wouldn’t you rather just walk?” a perfect stranger horrifyingly asks her. McCully Brown has her answer ready: “Actually, I have cerebral palsy, which is a little like a . . .”

“Are you tired?” I’m often asked, not unkindly, only unaware. Are you so indolent? I hear. Do you not take good care of your body? My POTS explanation has gotten more honed: “When I stand from sitting or go uphill, my brain doesn’t tell the blood in my legs to move back up and help out my heart.” Sometimes I add, “Your body is doing it correctly, right now, and you don’t even know it.”

Sometimes, even a huge guzzle of water doesn’t do the trick; my body has overheated and is heading for a crash, and I have to leave this kitchen that holds beloved people sooner than I’d wanted. Returning to the house where I’m staying, I change into fresh clothes that aren’t drenched in sweat, crawl under the covers of the guest room bed, and let my body sleep and recover.

McCully Brown pairs this sort of frustration, her own similar disappointing scenarios, with the also-truth that “I am so lucky.” Lucky to be mobile at all, in her case, to have seen what she has seen, to have this particular life she has always wanted as a writer who gets to travel. “I am so lucky,” she says. I add, How can I complain?

*

Every day during the Vermont week, I imagine my garden and my flower beds back home in Virginia where the weather has been in the nineties, no rain. I wonder which flowers have bloomed, which vegetables begun to produce, and if the tomatoes that were already failing when we left have totally yellowed and shriveled and died.

Whatever the state of the garden, I have other questions. I wonder if I will have the stamina to go out into the cutting beds, to lean in and revel in the bees, to meditatively clip off dead heads and invite more blooms, to pull any competing weeds out of the ground beneath. I fear, instead, I will only be able to hastily snip stalks for a kitchen island bouquet–cosmos, sunflower, larkspur–and then race into the safety of air conditioning, breathing hard, prickly all over, and wondering if the brief foray was worth it.

I cannot know. I will find out when I get there what sort of capacity this foyer to the natural world offers—if it will let me in and how long it will let me stay. Unlike McCully Brown, I don’t often think in terms of luck, but I am lucky to have this growing space, to have the husband who built it for me, who does the literal heavy-lifting acts of garden maintenance. To have the cool-weather spring season of seeding and watering and watching for new life. To hold the hope of any yield that might come in summer, small or imperfect as it may be - one of three tomato plants or spotted-leaf zinnias.

We built and continue to build this garden, knowing my physical limitations. At some point every growing season, I ask, “Is this worth it? Should I stop trying?” But oh, this desire to be among the green growth and the moth wings and the bees’ buzz, and my inability to garden like I'd like to, to harvest the red and purple stars of the zinnia blooms. This desire to fully give myself over to the beauty of the growing world is exhausting in its inability to be.

But it isn’t about the harvest, the results, the personal payoff: it’s about being among the living and dying world in such a close, personal microcosm, and the glory of all of it. I know the likeliest outcomes: some of the tomatoes will get sunblight this year, or the hardiest variety of flower will inexplicably fail. I’ll spend half of July and all of August stuck inside, watching the blooms grow from a distance. Still, to open the curtains at my high bedroom window and look down upon the dwarf sunflowers, the flowering thyme, the two cucumber plants with their bright, elephant-ear leaves curving north- and southward around the sides of their bed, bending with a loving reach toward the flower seedlings that still grow: this is it.

*

Now it is the middle of summer, and I’m in my garden. We’ve learned that a multi-hose drip system is necessary, so on the mornings that are already pressing down with a clammy hand of muggy heat before the sun has crested the trees, I can take three steps outside the basement door, turn the faucet knob in the brick wall to full blast, and hasten back into the cool dark of the basement. I send my husband out to harvest the tomatoes. Some evenings, I collect cucumbers in the dusk.

Evening is the most beautiful time of day in the garden, anyway, even better than early morning with the birds lighting along the fence posts, hopping down by twos and threes to dig for grubs in the dirt of my beds. The poets are right; some kind of magic alights at the boundary of the day, when the water has all been given and the sun’s work is done. The plants seem not to rest, but to stretch toward something greater than this world, this life, that can’t be seen by the light of the sun. I circle the two long beds, pretending to weed or check for missed fruit or dried leaves, but really, I am catching my breath for the wonder of it, and the metaphor is almost too obvious, but it holds.

References

1. Brown, Molly McCully, “Something’s Wrong with Me,” Places I’ve Taken My Body. W. F. Howes Ltd., 2022.

2. Dillard, Annie. Holy the Firm. HarperCollins, 1988.

3. Gay, Ross, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Lace & Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens. Get Fresh Books, 2022.

4. Whitman, Walt, “Of the Waters” https://inthewordsofwaltwhitman.com/nature-2/of-the-waters/