Your mom likes to bounce around, my husband told our young adult son. I am fairly certain he was referring to the reading material I had packed for our recent four day trip to West Texas. But, honestly, he could have been referring to any number of my ADHD tendencies. In this case, yes. It was my reading material. And, yes, I did plan to bounce around. Why else would one pack five magazines and seven books to read over four days if one wasn’t planning to bounce around some?
One of the books I packed was Growing, Older by Joan Dye Gussow. I had pulled it off the shelf – once again – to try and read. I had numerous failed attempts at reading this book, as evidenced by the various dog eared pages throughout the first twenty or so pages of the book. Yet, here I was, once again drawn to read this book.
Why did I not devour it as I had her previous book, This Organic Life: Confessions Of A Suburban Homesteader? If one were to ask me for a list of my five all time most favorite books, This Organic Life would be on the list. If one were to ask me if there was one book I had read multiple times, again – it would be This Organic Life. Why, then, could I not get through Growing, Older? Ah. There it is. Why did I not notice this or think about this as I was packing!
That subtitle.
A Chronicle Of Death, Life and Vegetables.
Death. “Growing, Older begins when Gussow loses her husband of forty years to cancer.”
One simply does not read a book on cancer and death when one’s husband has cancer. And one certainly does not read a book on said topic while on a four day road trip where one’s husband is doing a 24 hour bike ride that supports a cancer organization. Yet, there I was. Growing, Older. Determined this time to read it in its entirety. I pulled it out and tried to pick up at the current dog eared page. No. I would need to start over from the beginning. Too much time and too much life has passed since my last attempt at reading Gussow’s book.
It would be fair to ask: Why was I so determined to read this book? Well, Gussow’s earlier book was simply so good, so inspirational, that I couldn’t figure out why this book felt entirely different to read. Ah. Cancer. Death. It felt too ominous, too personal. More from the back cover reveals my own anxiety. “Without a partner, she continues growing her own year-round diet – while bucking popular notions of how ‘an elderly widowed woman’ should behave.” There it is. My own fears. Very early in my husband’s cancer journey, he nearly died from surgery complications. Not cancer. But surgery complications. That experience is still raw. And – to be brutally honest – I yelled at him, “How could you almost die already? You haven’t even starting fighting cancer yet and you almost died!” Growing, Older brought all of those emotions and memories flooding back.
Our trip to West Texas for the 24 Hours In The Canyon bike ride was certainly not an ideal time to try to read this book once again, yet by the time we got home I was more than halfway through the book and even more determined to finish it, which I did just a few days later. I am thankful that I finished the book, but it won’t be one I read again and again, as I have with This Organic Life.
I don’t recall where or when I bought and first read This Organic Life, but it was published in 2001, which was the year I had to leave my much-loved job at an organic garden center as I was first on bedrest due to pregnancy complications, then a mom to a premature baby boy. I had a lot on my plate in those days and for many years after, but I would – from time to time – be drawn to this book for a quick re-read until – at this point in my life – I can nearly recite entire passages and open the book and quickly find a quote that I want to reference. It feels like an old friend by now, which is why, after finishing Growing, Older, I was interested in searching the author’s name online and was saddened to read that she had passed away last year, just a few days before my dad passed away. Gussow was 96 years old at the time of her passing, perhaps a testament to the value of eating one’s own homegrown organic vegetables.
I talk often about my original garden, the one I started thirty years ago. It was organic from the start. No chemicals have been used here since we acquired this piece of earth. Somewhere in those first few years of gardening I discovered antique roses and it was love at first sight. Within a few years, a couple of antique roses led to a dozen led to 150 at the height of its glory. I always left room for herbs and a few vegetable plants, but my original garden was primarily a rose garden. My husband had asked me early on to please, leave a bit of grass and I took him at his word: Bit. We have a bit of lawn. Over the years, sod was removed for new flower beds until now – from the street out front to the back fence line – nearly every inch of the property is devoted to my gardens.
Rose Rosette Disease is an awful virus that is spread by a microscopic mite and it tore through my garden like wildfire around 2012. Over a two year time period, I had three distinct waves of RRD and – in the end – my rose garden was reduced to only four roses that somehow avoided the mite and the virus. I was still in the midst of figuring out my “What Next For This Garden?” when I had several autoimmune health issues and one nasty neurological disease pop up. I spent the better part of a year living on toast as that was one of the few foods that I could tolerate eating. During this time, much of my garden went feral – the roses had been removed but nothing planted to take their place. Then Covid hit. My doctors were all in agreement: I was way too sick to get Covid and I needed to avoid any risk of exposure. The seed for eating locally grown food had been planted years prior, when I first read This Organic Life and admired Gussow’s passion for, in her own words, “year-round local eating” and “vegetal self-sufficiency.” During those early Covid lockdown weeks, sending my husband to the grocery store with my grocery list, I realized it was time to start shopping at the local farmer’s market that I had long wanted to attend. Perhaps I could grocery shop in the open air and improve my health by eating locally grown produce? I got to know many of the vendors, including Cardo, who began growing microgreens back in the 1970’s while he was in college. I slowly started trying new foods and seeing improvements in my health. Cardo sparked my interest in microgreens and growing unusual fruits and vegetables. This Organic Life was pulled off the shelf once more and re-read, this time with a deeper interest – Could I grow my own food? I had the empty flower beds, just waiting for my “What Next?” Could I pivot from a flower gardener to a vegetable gardener? This Organic Life was the perfect manual I needed – filled with inspiration and advice. Gussow’s garden in New York may be vastly different than my garden in North Texas, but all gardeners face the same challenges at some point in time – too wet, too dry, too hot, too cold and – What about those pests?! Sure, I don’t have woodchucks and muskrats, but the feeling of walking out to the garden in the morning and finding the spaghetti squash – the one you have patiently been waiting to mature – half eaten by a squirrel is the same sort of Mr. McGregor angst.
Five years have now passed since I first started converting my gardens over to food production. I have had some derailments along the way, with both my ongoing health issues and my husband’s cancer taking over some of my time and energy. But to everything there is a season, a time when one needs to sit back and just feel the peace of the garden and then there are times to move forward. I am so thankful that I have (finally!) read Growing, Older as it showed me that life moves on even in grief and that you can bury a lot of sorrow in the garden. I am so thankful that my husband and I are both doing well at the moment and that I am able – in this season – to devote more of my time and energy in to growing my own food. I wish I had been able to meet Gussow during her lifetime, but I feel a bit of her every time I am able to prepare a meal with my own harvests. May her spirit live on, inspiring future generations.
Keep calm and garden on.
(Photograph above shows my harvest on June 1st, 2026. I garden in zone 8b in Southern Denton County, Texas.)
the melodious garden 