The truth in poppies

22 years ago Dearly Beloved and I renovated a house, a little house with an address that causes people to pay obscene amounts of money for old fixer-uppers, just so they can claim an address within that postal code.

The forty year old bungalow came complete with a flower bed at the side. The bed was filled with bright orange poppies, their huge blooms resting atop spindly stems that seemed an improbable match for the wind that periodically blows through the valley in which the house sits. I wasn't fond of them and had other plans for the bed.

When I mentioned digging up the flower bed, my aunt, the resident gardener in the family, asked if she could rescue the poppies and transplant them in her own flower bed. Once they were gone the flower bed was subjected to insulation, paint, wood shavings, mortar and size twelve construction boots. We moved into the house in October and all through the winter I made plans for a pristine bed of pretty geraniums, pansies, marigolds; low growing and multi-coloured.

Early summer came. I ran into my aunt and asked her how she was enjoying the poppies. She told me that they died...it seems they didn't take kindly to being uprooted. Not long after that I noticed that one spindly stem was starting to break through the dirt in my flower bed. One lone poppy, sole survivor of our renovation project, seemed to be growing out of the foundation of the house, just to the left of the downspout. It bloomed, faded and retreated in the soil.

It came back the following the summer. The summer after that two poppies sprouted. It became a game...how many poppies would bloom each year?

Circumstances turned against for a while and Dearly Beloved, T1 and T2 and I were forced to relocate for a while and turn our house over to a series of tenants. In December of last year, after a twelve year absence, we moved home.

A couple of weeks ago, I was walking down my driveway, thinking that I should soon start to weed the flower bed and get something planted, I took my first good look at the thing since moving back home.

Over half of the bed and a chunk of the strip of land between us and our neighbour was filled with long spindly stems, each topped with a fuzzy unopened pod. In my absence, the poppies had re-established themselves despite being neglected and untended....

*****

Thirty years ago, my lungs crashed after a bout of pneumonia and were left permanently scarred and damaged. I would later learn that the nurse who tended me were discussing among themselves the bleak prognosis that I might make it to twenty-five.

At twenty-five, newly engaged and looking forward to my life with Dearly Beloved when the second medical crisis, rheumatoid arthritis, hit. The lung issues made treatment difficult, so difficult in fact that by the time my medical team got to my last option...I weighed less than 100 lbs. and the steam from the shower could suck the breath from my lungs.

It was Dearly Beloved who ultimately saved my life...but that is an entire blog post in itself.

The last treatment finally worked, but the prognosis was still grim...maybe I'd make it to 35..but there would be no children in my future...too dangerous all the way around...

Last month, I turned 47...my children, who aren't supposed to exist, turned 16 this month, Dearly Beloved (who mother never believed would stick around) and I will celebrate our 22nd wedding anniversary next month...

The medical team stopped placing their bets a long time ago and now believe that I may just make it to a reasonably old age if I take care of myself...

I have been uprooted, stomped down, subjected to conditions not entirely compatible with a happy life...but here I am...it may not be a perfect life by most normal standards...but it is my life...and I like it.

*****

Maybe I'll just weed the flower bed, work around the poppies and just leave them be...

Maybe I have finally lived long enough to appreciate them.

Gina