“Debbie, Debbie, how does your garden grow?

‘With faith and friends

“And the sun’s warm glow.”

With apologies to the original English nursery rhyme’s author, there was poetry at work last Saturday, when Debbie Schammel planted her flower gardens with help from Rose Creek friends.

Two gardens actually: One east of the home of Rocky and Debbie Schammel at the west edge of Rose Creek along Mower County No. 4 and another on the west side of their home. In full bloom, the twin gardens are a dazzling sight to passersby. A quilt of many colors stretching beneath the sky. Like an artist’s palette fallen upon the earth. There to admire. Touch not, but the senses and the heart.

The kids are grown now, leaving Rocky and Debbie home alone. Rocky is the retired Mower County Sheriff’s deputy. A mountain of a man.

Debbie was forced to retire from her employment with Mower County in the Extension Service office and later the Department of Correctional Services, when cancer struck.

The dreaded “c” word became an obscenity and, like so many other cancer victims, created unimaginable hardships.

Breast cancer metastasized. Broken bones from lesions after chemo and radiation treatments were a complication. Most recently, a broken hip.

She candidly admits her cancer is fatal.

So, just what keeps her going? “My faith,” she said. “I’m probably stubborn, too, but my faith is very important to me. That and family and friends give me the strength to get through every day.””

When Debbie retired from her county employment, her last supervisor, Steve King, director of Correctional Services, organized a fitting send-off for the valued worker.

After the flow of retirement accolades, it was up to Debbie and her husband to face the facts of an uncertain future and manage for them.

Sure, their children, other relatives and friends helped, but when they were gone, it was only the wife and her husband.

Cancer works in mysterious ways. It comes and goes and sometimes grows no matter what is done to stop it. It’s an enemy even gentle giant Rocky couldn’t wrestle to extinction.

Debbie hasn’t given up judging by her active lifestyle. She teaches Sunday school classes at the family’s St. John Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod) in Austin, where she also sings in the church choir. She also sings with the Second Edition group.

She is an adult leader in the Southside 4-H club’s Cloverbuds organization for pre-4-Hers.

But this spring, there was one task waiting to be done.

A friend, Patty (Scheffel) Conradt, asked what she could do for Debbie and was told, “Weed my garden and plant my flowers.”

Becky Hartwig, co-owner of The Rose Pedaler and Debbie’s sister-in-law, joined forces with Conradt. That was Monday (May 17). By the following Saturday, friends, neighbors and strangers made it a planting bee. Even a brief rain shower could deter them. They huddled in a shed and when the rain stopped, they went to work.

“She’s really well loved by everybody and they wanted to help,” Patty Conradt explained. “As soon as I got the word out, people were calling and asking what the could do, what can they give to help.”

A key ingredient to Saturday’s good deed was friendship.

Carmen Thompson worked with Schammel in the Mower County Extension Service office, where a friendship was born. “She’s one of my favorite people,” Thompson said. “We still get together — Ann, Julie, Cindy, Debbie and I — for supper or lunch once a month.

The work continued until late afternoon Saturday. Weeds were pulled. The perennial beds were mulched.  Seeds and plants carefully pushed into the ground. The family’s vegetable garden was planted, too.

Then soaked in water and left for the sun to nourish.

It wasn’t all work: Volunteers donated a smorgasbord of food and soft drinks, which provided ample opportunities for friends to talk.

Debbie’s daughter, Sarah, in Washington State would hear the details when she called her parents later. Debbie’s son, Scott, who lives down the road from his parents, was there to help.

Debbie watched from the shade of a golf cart, talking, it seemed, with everyone who came over. Lori Amick, Margaret Andree, Linda Johnson and the others. Over 50 people, friends in some way one and all, but somewhere among them cancer survivors and victims, too.

Debbie’s husband, Rocky, knows her best. “She has a really strong faith,” he said, “and with that faith her cancer doesn’t bother her quite as much as it does me.”

“I get a little more up-tight about it because it is happening to her and not me,” he said.

Nobody knows for sure what goes on inside Debbie Schammel’s heart and mind when the limelight around her dims.

Everybody in Rose Creek, it seems, knows something very bad was supposed to happen to this fine woman this spring.

Could it be the miracles Debbie watches grow in her garden could include one for her?

Rose Creek is praying it does.