An Excerpt from “The Scent of a Daphne”

I’m pleased to share a sneak peek of my piece, “The Scent of a Daphne,” which will appear in the anthology Rooted: The Best New Arboreal Nonfiction. It’s not really a story about a daphne but it is a story with a daphne in it. It shares a snippet of my time in horticulture school when my husband was undergoing cancer treatment and I was trying to study plants. Mostly, it’s about the unexpected, precious gift I received during that time.

“The Scent of a Daphne”

“It was early September, my second semester of horticulture school, and class was about to begin. I stood outside the door on the narrow sidewalk that ran along the building. The day was warm and the door propped open with a wedge. Flies buzzed in and out. Students chatted and shuffled through notebooks while friends hugged at seeing each other again. I hadn’t made any friends yet, but that didn’t bother me. I had other things on my mind. Like the situation I had to explain to Tim, my professor.

He was an outdoorsy 50-something with wavy gray hair dressed in jeans, boots, and a canvas jacket. “What’s up?” he asked.

It was actually what was down. Down in my life. As in down and out, or beaten down, or in a downward spiral. My husband, Ethan, had just had an operation, not to remove an organ or clean out dangerous tissue or repair a ligament. The surgeon had installed a port in his chest, a small flat disc with a little tube connected to his artery so chemotherapy drugs could be injected into his bloodstream. He was about to be poked with a lot of needles a lot of the time and surgically inserting a port was easier on his body than poking the same veins again and again.”