November 13, 2010

Written November 12 for publication November 13, 2010
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Pain is exhausting. Last night I went to bed at 8:30. I first woke up a little after midnight and went to talk with my husband, who was hard at work on his book, and found him up and dressed. I was surprised and said so, and he pointed out the time and said he wasn’t UNdressed yet.
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I woke up again repeatedly during the night, and at 5:30 I was awakened by the pain in my knees and got up knowing I was up for the day. I’m off ibuprofen until after the surgery, so there is nothing to combat the inflammation of the knees and the fibromyalgia. As Dr. Seuss put it, “Old age is not for sissies.” I remember when my GRANDMOTHER was 67, and come to think of it, I’ll bet that’s why I’m upset about being 67. I can’t remember knowing when she was younger than that, though of course I knew her when she was younger. My Turney grandparents were both in their 40s when they died, but my Guice grandparents were considerably older than they were.
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I found myself thinking of what my physical therapist told me yesterday, in my first meeting with him. He explained that because the parts of my new knee are being cemented together, I’ll be able to put my full weight on the knee at once, but I won’t want to because of the pain. Although bone surgery is always painful, the main cause of the new pain will be the muscles, nerves, and sinews trying to get into the new position in a hurry. The deterioration in my knee has pulled them out of position gradually, over many years, and it will take several months for them to get back to the right size and the right position. For the first three weeks I will wear, 24/7, a gadget on my knee that will keep ice water flowing around the knee to combat inflammation. It is warmed enough by the pump that it won’t numb the knee too much or risk frostbite, but it’s an ingenious idea.
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My neighbor Wilbur, who has had the same surgery I’m getting, doesn’t have this; instead, he’s got a gadget that is extremely heavy but keeps his legs’ circulation right. He had to go to a convalescent center, because with the first knee his wife tried to take care of him and nearly killed herself with the labor of putting the gadget on and then taking it off and taking it off the bed umpteen times a day. She feels bad about putting him in the convalescent center, but killing herself caring for him would have been stupid in the long run.
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That reminded me of my wisdom teeth. My dentist in Georgia had told me I had severe arthritis in my jaws, and had tried several things, including injections directly into a cramped muscle. This was not amusing. Finally he put me on a combination of Valium as a muscle relaxer and Darvon to combat the pain. As I was also drinking heavily to combat the pain, I haven’t the slightest idea how I survived the situation.
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When we were ready to return to Texas, I stocked up on three months’ worth of Valium and Darvon so I wouldn’t have to look for a dentist while we were still getting settled in. But finally the time came, and I drearily went and found a new dentist. He absolutely refused to write the prescriptions; he said, “This can’t be right. Let’s take some X-rays.”
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The X-rays disclosed that my jaw was in a half-locked position; it was forced there by all four wisdom teeth, which had roots that were as tangled as the roots of a pot-bound plant. He put me into the hospital, because the necessary surgery would be done under general anesthetic. It would be impossible otherwise.
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When I woke up, the first thing I said was, “My mouth fits.” Then my dentist came in, looking worse than I felt, and told me that it had taken him four hours and all the strength and delicacy that he had to dig out all those roots. In places they were literally tied in knots. He told me I had to be extremely careful not to fall and to eat only soft foods, because in places my jawbone was as thin as a sheet of typing paper. He told me that the bone would fill back in, but it wouldn’t do it overnight. As I recall, it took about six months.
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From what the therapist told me, when my spinal anesthetic–because they want me to be awake during the surgery, but not feeling pain–wears off, I’ll feel much the same way, except it will be my knee that fits. There’ll be a lot of pain and I’ll be on strong painkillers for several weeks, but I’ll be able to feel that my right knee is now in the right position. (He told me they could see from the X-ray not only THAT my kneecap kept slipping to the left, but also WHY it was doing it.)
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So, although I’m expecting a brief period of worse pain, I’m very excited about the surgery. For years I have been unable to get up off the ground or the floor by myself unless I had something very study and waist-high to lean on as I got up. Otherwise, somebody has had to haul me up. By planting time this spring, I should be able to get down and up by myself. It wasn’t the muscles weakening, but them and the sinews and tendons that had gotten so far out of shape that they could no longer serve their intended purpose. It’s as if I were trying to use a pulley when the rope was off the spindle (or whatever you call it).
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I have one of the best bone surgeons in the country. He is one of the inventors of a special artificial knee designed for women. It’s not just a matter of size–they come in many different sizes–but a woman’s knee is subtly different from a man’s knee, and they aren’t interchangeable.
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I just got an email from my brother Lee. He broke his neck falling off a horse about ten years ago, and now his spinal column is growing extra calcium lumps on the inside. This is pressing against his spinal cord, which is pushing back, and he’s in serious pain and has some paralysis. He has pain meds but unlike me, he can’t work when he takes them. He’s starting anti-inflammatory meds, and his doctor is in consultation with a major spinal surgeon. Obviously they’re going to have to remove the calcium, but it’ll have to be done very gingerly so as not to harm the spinal cord. I asked him to have his wife keep me posted, because I don’t want him wasting what energy and thinking time he has left to send me emails. I just put him on the Temple prayer roll, and while I was about it, I also put my son and daughter-in-law and myself on it. All of us can use some extra prayers right about now.
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This is Friday. This afternoon Julee and whoever her current helper is–usually it’s Sally–will be here to help me get the house ready for me to be an invalid. The therapist said that for the first three weeks I shouldn’t sit up for longer than an hour at a time, I shouldn’t walk anywhere I can get out of walking, and I shouldn’t stand still for more than two minutes at a time. So Julee and Sally will make the bed—I’ve got the mattress cover, the sheets, the pillows’ hypoallergenic covers, and the pillow cases all out on a stripped bed–and then Sally will clean the kitchen while Julee and I will finish moving things in the bedroom and possibly in the barn, which was designed as another place for me to lie down when I was recovering. Then I’ll do a megalaundry Saturday, so all the clothes in the house will be clean. Julee will have to come over several times during the next two months to remake the bed; the size of the room is such that T can’t get at the bed. Janice (Wilbur’s wife) has offered to do it, but I don’t want her to because she’s in her eighties and I don’t want to put more work on her when she’s already doing both her work and Wilbur’s plus working in the Temple starting at five AM two days a week. I’ll JUST be up and around from my right knee in time for my left knee to be replaced, so Julee and Sally may do the bed making for up to four months. Expensive, but not as expensive as knocking my transplant out of place.
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Monday I’ll be in the hospital early in the morning, ready for my knee to be cut open and put back together. So you’ll have a column Monday posted Sunday night, and then it’ll be probably Thursday or Friday before I’m back. But I promised you a minimum of three columns a week, each one including a book review, and you’ll get it, even if some of next week’s columns wind up in the following week. Publishers, where are you? I’m literally out of garden books after tomorrow. Library, here I come.
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Today I’ll be talking about Easy Garden Projects to Make, Build, and Grow: 200 Do-It-Yourself Ideas to Help You Grow Your Best Garden Ever. It’s edited by Barbara Pleasant and the Editors of Yankee Magazine, and published by Rodale Press.
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My galaxy isn’t lit up by the picture on the front, which features a child’s red wagon planted with tomatoes and nasturtiums, and a wooden ladder painted distressed blue with potted plants sitting on all the steps, the bucket holder, and the top. I don’t happen to own a child’s red wagon. They’re not cheap, and if I had one I’d use it to haul things in, because it would rust out in two seasons if it was used as a planter. I do have a couple of wooden ladders that could go into service to hold potted plants, but at times the wind around here is so strong that it would blow all the pots off the ladder and possibly also blow the ladder down. If I decided to use a ladder in the garden, it would be as a trellis, with vines growing up it. The vines would hold it in place by the time they’d been growing for a month, but I don’t think my husband would go for the idea. He doesn’t get the idea of distressed wood, for one thing, and he’d think the use of something for what it clearly wasn’t designed for would look cheap and ugly. He likes the idea of repurposing and has even suggested some repurposing himself, but not this kind: it reminds me of something a black friend of ours said in chewing out his niece for the looks of her front yard: “It looks ghettoish.” T considers this kind of blatantly garish repurposing to “look ghettoish,” and that is not what he wants for our yard. One side yard and most of the front yard is now one large rock garden, designed and created for us by another black man–Johnnie; that’s all he’ll let us call him–and T would scream bloody murder if anybody tried to move one pebble out of place. He considers the rock garden a work of art–I do too–and it is completely different from garish repurposing.
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Johnnie started by creating a small rock garden in front of the garden shed T uses to store his books in, and when Manny wanted to move several of the large stones T instantly vetoed it. Manny’s suggestions were for the sake of safety, and T says there are ways of obtaining the safety without meddling with a work of art.
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Let me mention here that we have a multicultural household, if you count temporary workers as part of the household. Our contractor, Manny, is Mexican–he has permanent resident status and is working on getting his citizenship–and most of his part-time helpers are Hispanic but born in the United States. Julee and her assistants are white. Earnest, who put in the sprinkler system, and Johnnie are black; we hired them because Earnest is the closest friend of our friend Frank, who also is black. Earnest recommended Johnnie for the rock garden project. And so it goes. We don’t seem to hire individuals so much as we hire families and/or communities.
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This year I couldn’t have had a garden without Manny and his team. They built planting beds, planted, dug, tilled, came up with good ideas, and generally did what I could have done in five summers when I was twenty. Next summer I’ll be able to do more for myself–fortunately, because the legacy we have been using to remodel our house and yard is almost spent. T says that with inflation going the way it is going, we had better spend the money while it’s still spendable, but on real work, not on junk. And so that’s what we’ve done. (We met Manny in the doorway of the bank.)
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But there are some good and easy projects in this book, and by next summer I should be able to do some of them. Being rather clumsy, I have been forbidden to use a power saw by my husband, a neighbor who is a lawyer, our stake patriarch (that is an LDS priesthood position), several other neighbors, and all my children and their spouses, so I can’t use a power saw. Our neighbor who is a retired fire captain and EMT didn’t forbid me to use a power saw; he just laughed and laughed when I tentatively suggested it. But this book takes into account the fact that a lot of gardeners aren’t in a position to use a power saw, and provides projects that either don’t need wood cut or need only four or five cuts that can be made at the lumber yard for a dollar or two each.
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Chapter One is about creating good soil, and I want to quote the subtitle: “The importance of soil stewardship extends to even the smallest garden. Growing good soil is as enjoyable and satisfying as growing favorite plants.” As more and more cities go for rooftop gardens–there are several in Salt Lake City, including one on the Conference Center that was designed by our neighbor Peter Lassig before he retired from being chief gardener of the entire LDS Church–more and more building superintendents are finding themselves buying or making soil. *
Once when I was a child, I saw my grandfather digging soil out of what had once been a minnow pond. When I asked him why there was dirt in the minnow pond, and why he wanted to get it out, he told me that the dirt used to be leaves, which he had put there in the fall, and now it had turned into dirt. Astounded and amused, I said, “PAPA! Leaves don’t grow into dirt!” Of course I was wrong. Leaves do grow into dirt, and grow is the right word, because all kinds of small plants and small animals, some so tiny you can’t see them without a microscope, grow like mad in a proper compost mixture–besides the leaves, there was a lot of chicken manure in the minnow pond–and they grow together, eating the nutrients and turning them out in a form plants can use. So yes, you do make soil, and that is one of the most important garden projects.
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Even in a small apartment, it is possible to have a small worm bed and feed the garbage to the worms. The worm castings are perfect fertilizer, and with the addition of a small amount of vermiculite and a small amount of builder’s sand, they’re perfect potting soil. If you are fortunate enough to have an east- or south-facing balcony, you can grow more vegetables than you would think–lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, tomatillos, a whole salsa garden. And of course, there is always the AeroGarden. I know I sound like an ad for, but I love them.
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The second chapter is about plant propagation, including seeds and other methods of getting crops going. But this same chapter goes on to discuss different places where seeds may be started, ranging from old drawers to straw bale beds through numerous different things where others would see only trash but this writer seeds a plant starter. Some of them seem a bit silly to me, such as “an old bed frame . . sunk into the garden and filled with colorful pansies or petunias.” I hope we don’t even have to think about old bathtubs and old toilets. They are in terrible taste no matter how cutesy they are. But fortunately, the authors agreed with me.
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The book goes on to discuss plant supports ranging from formal to totally informal, including stepladders with the pots supported by something that will protect them from the wind. Like other books, they suggest a sunflower teepee play house, and like other books, they suggest running scarlet runner beans up the sunflower stalks, totally forgetting that beans and sunflowers don’t get along.
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Then we discuss ingenious ways to water. It is undoubtedly true that most methods of watering waste water, and these ideas come up with interesting and sometimes unique ways of providing enough water to the plants with as little waste as possible. Harvest season and planting season both can be stretched by using some new ideas with some very old ones, and if both are stretched there is time to double or maybe even triple crop in the same amount of time it would normally take to grow one season’s worth of plants. This is followed by discussing ways to attract wildlife to your garden. Admittedly there is some wildlife we all can do without–skunks, for example–but we all enjoy birds, and intelligent people enjoy toads. But the book proceeds to give us ways to get rid of the wildlife that we DON’T want in our garden.
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Plants that produce heavily, or work as perennials, are then discussed, along with ways of taking care of them without wearing yourself out.
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And speaking of wearing things out . . . Julee and Sally left several hours ago, I finished putting away the things Julee had started sorting on my bed, then I read the rest of Biblical Archaeology Review and the first 2011 seed catalog to cross my doorstep, finding several plants I’d never heard of before and several more that were less expensive through that catalog than any other source I’ve seen so far. So I put them in a drawer and came in here to finish this column.
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Good people, I’m tired, and on Monday I have to be bathed, dressed, and in the hospital by 7:30 AM. This is Friday and this is the Saturday column I just wrote. I don’t do a Sunday column, and Sunday I’m going to be resting preparing for Monday. So I’ll see you when I drag my weary self home from the hospital Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday or whenever it turns out to be. I have two new books I had forgotten about, so I will be preparing reviews for you while I’m flat on my back reading. Meanwhile my husband will check me out ten more garden books from the library, and I have appealed to publishers and gadget producers to send me books and gadgets to review.
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“Gladly would he learn, and gladly teach.” I chose that as my motto when I was a senior in high school, and I recently learned, to my pleased surprise, that my oldest daughter chose the same motto, without consulting with me. But I have to rest now, so that I’ll have time to learn more and then share it with you.

Write to me at gardenwindow@aol.com, and let’s see if we can get a conversation going.

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