By Janna Matthies
The day Mom starts cancer treatment, her family plants a garden, and the children spend the whole growing season watching the pumpkins ripen toward fall, when the doctor says she'll be well again.
The doctor tells Janie and Jeffrey their mom will be better by pumpkin time, and the children work out that pumpkin time is months away. So they plant a garden to mark the wait. All spring and summer they tend it while Mom goes through her treatment — the surgery, the chemotherapy, her hair falling out, the days she's too tired or too sick to get out of bed, and the good days in between. The garden keeps growing while they wait. By the middle of October they finally find two pumpkins hidden under the vines, and by then Mom's treatment is over and she is well. The whole long stretch of a parent's cancer is here, but the children always have the garden to tend and water while they wait for it to end.
For a child whose mom or dad is in the long middle of cancer treatment, the hardest part is often not knowing when it will end. This book gives that a shape a child can actually see: a garden, a season, a harvest to count toward. It doesn't skip the hard parts — the shaved head and the sick days are right there on the page — but it ends with Mom well, so a child comes away with the real picture and with hope. And the garden gives the whole family something to do together while they wait, instead of only worrying.