Another Path to My Garden

By Lew Blancher

Unabashedly, I admit Marilyn Noell is a friend. We were introduced through a mutual friend three, perhaps four, years ago. Ostensibly my wife and I were invited to her home to see her unique and beautiful garden. But the visit occasioned an even more interesting facet of the prideful owner: she was at a standstill writing her autobiography.

Marilyn had started the writing some years earlier but was having her doubts about continuing. She did not confide in us the precise reasons for her reluctance to carry on, but during subsequent visits she would give a running report on her attempts. Meanwhile, our friendship and our attention to the growing garden flourished.

Then, late last spring, Marilyn reported that she had found a publisher. Her book would be out in the fall. She also told me that the publisher wanted to include a poem I had written about her garden.

Another Path to My Garden is, to use the popular idiom, a good read; better, I think, than most autobiographies. I’d place it alongside Christie Brown’s My Left Foot in its literary excellence.
I say so not bent by bias, but by the sheer joy in having read it.

A dive into shallow water divided Marilyn’s brain from the rest of her body. She was 19 and had finished her first year at Queen’s University that June 23, 1949. Significantly, while suspended in the water like a lazy fish, her only thought was to get to the surface and suck in air. That urge to prolong life, that zest to achieve what looked to be impossible, would carry her to her renewed objective in life . . . to be an important contributor to the world!

With humour -- sometimes ribald -- and an almost breezy style, she relates her story. She tells how she ignored her mother’s skepticism about her ability to return to Queen’s, and the expectation that her family would look after her for as long as they lived.

We drift with her as her then-wicker wheelchair trundled her in a new direction and toward a profession. While she was still on the old premises of Lyndhurst Lodge, learning to develop what movement her arms and hands could muster, she sought out the advice of a social worker. While the woman was not encouraging, Marilyn decided that a social worker was what she was going to be. With the help of her able-bodied fellows she coped with mountains of stairs, gaining lifelong friendships along the way, and graduated from the University of Toronto.

The love of three men during Marilyn’s life was unfulfilling in different ways. Her first beau abandoned her after her accident. Her second, whom she met while both were in Lyndhurst, wasn’t able enough for both of them to manage alone the demands of a committed life. Don, the third, was strong enough, but after much travelling with him, their lives drifted in separate directions. They parted as friends.

While still working and with Don’s help, Marilyn bought a house. It has enabled her during the last four years to have installed her special garden, the theme of her autobiography. Another Path to my Garden: My Life as a Quadriplegic is 193 pages and is published by Dundurn Press in Toronto.

Marilyn’s Garden
-- Lew Blancher, July 13, 1989

Like jewels caught
on the glimmer
of diamonds,
flowers --
nymphs of seasons warm --
dance,

miriadly,

esconced amid
the silken profusion of patterned
green,
and
shining bright
as the deliberate sun
staining their fragrant fragility,
red, blue-white-purple
yellow, golden

they twinkle
on stanchions straight,
sinuously curled, twisting,
on wind-resilient threads
of green,
and
the touch
of gentle eyes.


(Lew Blancher is a freelance writer living in Toronto.)