Even as she weakens, garden is worth fight

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By MARY JO MELONE

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 13, 2001

In the photographs that pop up on shelves and tabletops in her East Lake Woodlands condominium, you see Nanette Burbank as she was once.

She was an artist who drew with photographic precision in pencil and painted in the medium that demands the most patience, watercolor.

Flowers and plants fill the apartment, even that spiky thing with red blooms called Crown of Thorns, and the plant that symbolizes healing, aloe.

Nanette was always a flower child. Still is, at heart. Her hair was long and blond, part of the signature look of a '60s woman. Jeans. Halters. Bare feet. In the pictures, she is clinging to an intense-looking brown-haired man on a balcony in Mexico.

Twenty years later, those hands that once expressed so much are gnarled as driftwood and twisted in ways no contortionist could match. Knobs protrude from her elbows and heels.

Doctors have done what they had to do with those slender hips and legs. Nanette has one artificial hip and two artificial knees. Her back has formed into the hump doctors long ago named for dowagers, even though she has nothing in common with them, chronologically. She is 48.

Rheumatoid arthritis has done most of this, or else it's the osteoporosis. It is common for those with arthritis, but worse for Nanette because the same drug that treats arthritic inflammation destroys bone. She is 5 inches shorter than she once was.

The change is without, also within. She was once wrapped up in herself and her desires, the urgent push of her own life. Pain changed her perspective.

"I wouldn't be who I am if I hadn't gotten this disease," she said. "This has made me stronger and more compassionate."

Still, she lacks the strength to pull a sheet over herself when she sleeps. She feels her rib cage sinking, her organs pressing in on themselves. Fear that she'll fall is her walking companion.

"I don't know what it's like to be dying," she said. But she senses that her desires are evaporating, that "everything is falling apart little by little."

Her mother has nevertheless extracted a promise from Nanette not to die before she does. Myra Burbank is 72. And she has also given Nanette a gift, a gift of a garden.

The garden is in front of Nanette's condo. It includes a trellis of orchids, mounds of impatiens under an oak, some birds of paradise and a short path of flagstones that leads to a wood and wrought iron bench, straight from Home Depot. There Nanette takes in the last cool hours of the day, and pots and repots what flowers she can.

That garden, that small monument to stubborn life, is where she told me she thinks she is dying -- and where she wondered why anybody would take away the garden.

It is on the common ground of East Lake Woodlands Condo Association 6. Nanette's mother didn't ask permission for the garden. The condo board has told her it must go or else. They've told her a couple of times. They have told her they might just come and rip it out.

That condo boards make these threats is a fact of nature. Common sense flees and the boards behave like Pavlov's dog.

But the story of Nanette Burbank and her garden may end up the man-bites-dog tale of Florida condo living.

The association's Tampa lawyer, Steven Mezer, prevailed upon the board at week's end to consider another way out. It is so simple it makes you wonder why anybody needs Robert's Rules of Order.

They can vote.

If three-quarters of the 80 owners among Condo Association 6 say yes, Nanette Burbank can keep her garden.

Her mother is already working on a campaign. She'll go door to door. Write letters. Take pictures.

I'll tell you what happens. I want to write another column that says the people who run condo boards have that quality Nanette Burbank spoke of -- compassion.

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