A Victory Garden for Trying Times by Debi Goodwin

Author:Debi Goodwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2019-09-06T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

IT WAS ONLY DURING MY TRIP to Spain that my body and mind recognized how slammed they’d been by the past seven months. The effect started the day I left. I spent so much time getting the garden in shape that I ended up leaving Niagara-on-the-Lake later than planned and worried my way through heavy traffic. Cursing myself. Feeling like a fool. At Terminal 3, which I seldom used, I found the automated check-in rushed and confusing. As I lined up to put my suitcase through an X-ray machine, an airline representative came up to me with my passport. I had left it in the machine reader. I suddenly felt old, incompetent, and, although I had always been a traveller and an expert at getting through airports and keeping my belongings safe, a travel newbie. In the wide space beside the gates, there were rows and rows of tables where relaxed people ordered food from iPads. I sat at a table and drank from a bottle of water I’d bought and felt like weeping. It had been a rough winter and this was the first time I’d sat down without anything needing to be done or without anything to distract me. There were no weeds to pull, no insects to blast off plants.

The press trip itself was delightful. S, from the Spanish consulate in Toronto, had organized an intensive itinerary through Andalusia. Each day was jam-packed, with little time left for anything but sleep and a quick nightly look at my photographs and notes of the day’s excursions. We were wined and dined on all the best the region had to offer; shepherded through a tourist-filled Alhambra and sleepy medieval towns in blistering summer weather. The group was small, just five Canadian writers travelling with S and a local guide. A friendly group, but I kept to myself a lot, lost in thought about Peter, still worried despite the last scan.

One day my ankles swelled up and that night I woke up with chest pains. I was convinced, after an internet search, that I had congestive heart failure and someone would find me dead in my bed. I had managed to keep such irrational fears at bay when I was taking care of Peter, getting him to appointments and trying to boost his spirits. Alone, my fear demons took over. In the morning, I discovered my ankles had been swollen from the straps on my sandals that had been pulled too tight and my chest pains were the first sign of a cold. I would most certainly live.

At the end of the six days I wished I was going back home with the others. I was sick and woke up to learn that Great Britain had voted to leave the European Union, unsettling news in trying times. I wanted to get back to my touchstones: Peter and my garden. But I continued to my weekend in Casablanca, which unfortunately involved an extra day to make the right flight connections.

The

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