Joan Dye Gussow - Growing, Older: A Chronicle of Death, Life, and Vegetables

Growing,
Older

Growing,
Older

A Chronicle of
Death, Life, and Vegetables

JOAN DYE GUSSOW

Chelsea Green Publishing
White River Junction, Vermont

Copyright 2010 by Joan Dye Gussow
All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be transmitted
or reproduced in any form by any means
without permission in writing from
the publisher.

Project Manager: Patricia Stone
Developmental Editor: Joni Praded
Copy Editor: Laura Jorstad
Proofreader: Helen Walden
Designer: Peter Holm, Sterling Hill
Productions
Frontispiece Map Illustration: Elayne Sears

Printed in the United States of America
First printing September, 2010
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 10 11 12 13 14

Our Commitment to Green Publishing
Chelsea Green sees publishing as a tool for cultural change and ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book manufacturing practices with our editorial mission and to reduce the impact of our business enterprise in the environment. We print our books and catalogs on chlorine-free recycled paper, using vegetable-based inks whenever possible. This book may cost slightly more because we use recycled paper, and we hope youll agree that its worth it. Chelsea Green is a member of the Green Press Initiative (www.greenpressinitiative.org), a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the worlds endangered forests and conserve natural resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gussow, Joan Dye.
Growing, older : a chronicle of death, life, and vegetables / Joan Dye
Gussow.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eBook ISBN: 978-1-60358-309-1
1. Gussow, Joan Dye. 2. Agriculturists--New York
(State)--Piermont--Biography. 3. Women agriculturists--New York
(State)--Piermont--Biography. 4. Vegetable gardening--New York
(State)--Piermont. 5. Organic gardening--New York (State)--Piermont. 6.
Old age--Psychological aspects. I. Title.
S417.G87A3 2010
613.2092--dc22
[B]

2010032212

Chelsea Green Publishing Company
Post Office Box 428
White River Junction, VT 05001
(802) 295-6300
www.chelseagreen.com

To Mother Nature,
Who sometimes makes it hard,
But always makes it worthwhile

CONTENTS

4. Taking the Red Pill

11. Watery Lessons

20. Asparagus

I never planned to write anything like a sequel to This OrganicLife.After five years of work on that book, Id had my say about the problems in the food system that first led me to grow my own. There was, of course, no shortage of garden topics yet to reflect on. Some of the plants with the longest history in my garden were missingzucchini, for example, the poster child for the overproductive gardener. And Id devoted no time to asparagus or beets or kale or broccoli or rhubarb or brussels sproutsor cranberries, for that mattersome of the other crops whose culture I have struggled to master in my small plot.

Yet despite its vegetable emphasis, This Organic Life was never meant to be just a gardening book. It began, after all, with the finding, gutting, and tearing down of a house. The story of that houses rebuilding, and the laying out of the garden that still sustains me, took up just four chapters. The remainder related the lessons I had learned from growing food on the west bank of the Hudson in the teeth of floods, woodchucks, droughteven my husbands death from cancer.

But woven persistently through all these meant-to-be-engaging stories were passages reflecting the concerns that underlay the entire enterprise, my conviction that we USerians urgently needed to become more local and seasonalmore consciouseaters. We had to start noticing where our food came from, I urged, so we could reduce the negative impact of our food choices on the planet, on the people who grew our food, and on our own health. What was it that our species needed to learn about food if we were to survive to the end of the twenty-first century? That was the real subject of the bookmy rationale for writing about the garden.

Yet lurking around the edges of those horticultural morality tales was another, much less obvious story that for a time ran parallel to the one I was writing down, a story I was trying not to tell. The fact behind the other story was not disguisednamely that early in the course of my work on This Organic Life, Alan, my devoted husband of forty years, had died suddenly of cancer. In several chapters I revealed his too-sudden death almost in passing, in a manner that, happily, most readers seemed to find touching. Some people, in fact, reported to me that they read the book as a love story: two devoted people gardening together, one of them dying, and the survivor soldiering on. Which turned out to be a partial truth.

The larger truthmy shocked discovery that I didnt miss Alan after he diedled to months of guilt and years of trying to write myself into an understanding that friends insisted I needed to share. Other people feel that way too, Joan, but no one says it. You, however, will be spared reading about most of those struggles, only a small portion of which have ended up in this book.

This book is made up mostly of other things: what I thought about after I learned I didnt miss Alan, and some of what I have been thinking and doing in the years since. Growing, Older is, really, a book about growingin this case the growing of a life-sustaining garden on the west bank of the ever-flooding Hudson River and the growing maturation of the aging gardenermewho nurtures it. It features my often amused reflections as I strive to grow older happily in a rapidly denaturing, novelty-obsessed world.

Largely retired from an academic life, and drawing strength from the chronic demands of a garden that feeds me, I reflect in successive chapters on howlacking a partners assistanceI deal with everything from broken appliances, bodily decay, thoughtless travel, and experiential obsolescence to repeated floods, muskrats, and river trash. Most of all, perhaps, I steadily deal with the disparity between the ideas I live by and incoming messages about how an elderly widowed woman ought to think and behave. Scattered throughout are urgent suggestions about what growing older on a changing planet will call on all of us to do: learn self-reliance and self-restraint, yield graciously if not always happily to necessity, andsince there is no other choicecome to terms with the insistencies of the increasingly unnatural world our choices have left us with.

This book is about my life path, about companionship, about being alone without being lonely. Its about how to be hopeful despite the increasingly alarming future of the planet, about how Ive made it through my first eighty years and what I plan to do with the next twenty should I live so long. The story includes vegetable production, of course, since that is a significant part of my life, and there are reflections on the inescapable reality of growing older, a reality that inevitably affects the garden enterprise that keeps on giving both substance and meaning to my later years.

JOAN DYE GUSSOW
AUGUST, 2010

I
The End of
My Marriage

To be no longer content to pick up what is floating on the surface of life, and to want only the pearls at the bottom of the sea, this is grace, welling up from deep inside.