I wanted to buy Patty a little something to remember us by, but when I turned around, she was gone.
And I guess her sudden disappearance makes sense, because she came into our lives just as suddenly as she left.
It’s just the way angels do business, I guess.
We met Patty when my wife and I went to Countryside Nursery in Crystal Lake, which is my wife’s favorite place to shop in the springtime. (Our credit card company loves it, too.)
It was business as usual for us at the nursery, which means that I was working up a lather trying to push my wife’s wheelchair with one hand over the gravel walkways, all the while hauling an overloaded plant wagon the size of a kitchen table behind me with the other hand.
Before her stroke six years ago, my wife did all the hauling herself, towing the overloaded cart over the gravel to the parking lot, loading the car, unloading it again at the house, and then hitting the garden with a manic troweling vengeance.
And I would sit in a lawn chair with a cold drink and a smile, because gardening was her gig—dirty fingernails, rose-thorn scratches, sore muscles and all.
But then, when a devastating stroke robbed her of the ability to walk or use her right arm, everything changed.
Imagine being a musician who has gone deaf. Imagine being an artist who has gone blind. My wife — a master gardener who can’t dig in the earth — could tell you how that feels. (Well, she would have to tell you about it with her eyes, because the stroke robbed her of speech, too.)
And so, after her stroke, I became her gardening hands, arms, legs and back. My daily exercise routine wasn’t working out for me anyway, so I figured: “What the heck? How hard can gardening be?”
I lost twenty percent of my body weight before that first summer was over. Most of it is still gone, thanks to a steady routine of pushing a wheelchair with one hand and hauling an overloaded plant wagon or grocery cart with the other.
That’s what we were doing when a sweet lady walked up to us at the nursery and said, “Here, let me pull that cart for you.”
I thanked her but waved her off. “I’m afraid we’re in it for the long haul,” I told her. “We just started shopping, and my wife is going to want to look at every plant in the place before we go. And half of them will be coming home with us.”
“No problem,” the lady said. “I’m finished with my shopping, and I’m in no hurry.”
I thanked her and asked her to haul the wagon up to the nearest paved walkway. She could leave it there and I could carry plants to it as I pushed the wheelchair up and down the gravel paths.
But she wouldn’t hear of it. She insisted on following us through the entire nursery, pulling the cart behind her for as long as it took.
It’s just the way angels do business, I guess.
We introduced ourselves and off we went.
On each gravel path, my wife cried out with glee as she spotted a plant she wanted in her garden. There were roses, and alyssums, and Shasta daisies, and prairie clovers, and clematis, and even something called “sneeze weed” — as appealing a name to have in a garden as something called “barf swill” would be on the dinner table.
As I picked up each plant, Patty explained a bit about it before putting it on the cart. “This one is an annual,” she would say. Or: “This one is a perennial that needs shade.” Or: “This one grows taller than four feet high.”
She said it all with a cautionary tone, as if unsure how much we knew about gardening. And while her cautions would have made sense if I had been the one picking out the plants (since I can’t tell a weed from a watermelon), my wife waved her warnings off with a knowing smile as she picked out one after another.
“You’d have to see her gardens to understand,” I told Patty. “We don’t have a house with a garden, like normal people do. We have a garden with a house in the middle of it. Sun, shade, dry, wet—we have it all.”
Before long the cart was full, and Patty asked me what we should do. “Well, leave this one here and I’ll go get another cart,” I said. “You’ve been a big help. You don’t have to keep doing this.”
But Patty wouldn’t hear of it. She hauled the laden cart to the checkout counter and vowed to come back with another one.
While she was gone, I reminded my wife of the shipments of bulbs we were expecting to arrive any day now from the plant catalogs we had ordered from. She nodded and waved her hand toward the checkout line. It was time to call it a day—for now.
When we got to the checkout line, Patty was explaining to the clerk that we would be there soon to pay. She turned to get another cart, and that’s when she saw us coming.
“All done for today, Patty,” I told her, and I thanked her for her kindness.
My wife thanked her silently, too. She reached up for a hug, and then she kissed Patty’s hand.
I was distracted by the clerk, who asked for our last name so she could look us up in her computer files.
And when I turned around, Patty was gone.
I was disappointed. I had wanted to buy her a little something to remember us by as a small token of thanks, but she had vanished as suddenly as she had appeared.
Just another day at the office for an angel, I guess.
She’s not the first angel we’ve met in the past six years. There have been others, though we haven’t always gotten their names.
But you know who you are.
And we thank you.
