Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow (13 page)

So this is what it feels like to not be able to call your heart your own
.

“Tea-tea, look what I found!” Abby came running from the back field, holding something in her hands, Cate hot at her heels.

“What is it?” I knelt down to see whatever small wonder she wanted to share with me. She stopped running and came close, until we were face-to-face; then she threw the contents of her hands high in the air. Dry grass seed showered down on me as she and Cate erupted in giggles.

“You
stinker
!” I said, shaking the grass seed out of my hair but smiling along with them.

I was surprised to hear this phrase come out of my mouth. My grandfather had called me
stinker
when I was young, but he had been dead twenty years. When I was a child, he used to visit us from his home in Florida, but when he died more than a decade later, I hadn't seen him in years.

Stinker
was a reference to my nature, a spiritedness he neither understood nor could control. It was equal parts endearment and scolding. Now, thirty years later, I was delighted to find my nieces were stinkers as well. The family mischievousness was in good hands for another generation.

“You guys want to see the hammock I put up?” They looked at me curiously.

“What is a hammock?”

“Follow me and I'll show you.”

I had strung the hammock under the rhododendrons,
stunned that a bush could grow big and sturdy enough. Ours towered over the garden, more than ten feet high. The hammock was hidden from view by those leaves Kim had realized served as a screen. The girls followed me to where the faded striped fabric made a long sling, and I showed them how to scramble in and swing back and forth.

“Push us, Tea-tea. Push us harder!” Their skinny legs went sprawling out of the hammock as I pushed them back and forth, and they laughed in delight; the sound washed over me like unexpected summer rain, the sort you hold your face up to drink in.

“You're really Weavers now,” I told them. “We love our hammocks in this family.”

We'd always had a hammock, ever since I could remember. I used to crawl in and wrap myself up as if I were in a cocoon, weaving my small fingers into the strings to keep it closed. My brother did the same, and I pushed him, making up a game where I twisted the cocoon so many times it would spin to unravel, and my brother would emerge dizzy and laughing, begging me to do it again.

There was never anyone to push me when I was young—my brother was unreliable in the quid pro quo department—but I figured out how to rig up one of the straight rakes from the garden to help me. I buried the tines in the dirt and leaned the handle up against the hammock at a perpendicular angle. Then, as I lay there reading, I could push against the handle, and, as a result, the hammock would rock back and forth. I remember feeling pleased at my invention, at having solved this small problem. There was no one to help, but I could help myself.

“Push us, Tea-tea,” my nieces cried. “Push us
harder
.”

And so I did, feeling glad to be there. To push them, to catch them; these children would need no rake. It felt like a joy I had not known before, a gift for all of us.

It felt like progress.

I began to plan our days in the garden, to think of things the girls would like, fun ways to share with them what I thought important: nature, adventurousness, imagination, wonder. There were days when we lay in the tall grass of the back meadow and looked for shapes in the lacy clouds that floated overhead: a boat, a rabbit, a snake. Studies say the average American child spends only minutes outside each day. I was glad to know that was not true of these two.

Sometimes I intentionally let them do nothing. They always gravitated to the meadow, running their hands through the tall grass collecting dried seed, as dreamy and self-occupied as I had been growing up in the country. In the rush of their own busy lives of soccer, swimming, tennis, choir, I was glad they had time to wander and daydream.

Other days we watered the garden, the girls each with her own small watering can. On hot days I set up the sprinkler, and they ran through, the droplets sparkling and catching light as I marveled at their pure joy from the simplest thing.

Years ago a high school teacher had quoted John Ciardi to our class—“Man is what he does with his attention”—and the idea had stayed with me ever since. What we spend our time and energy on is who we are, what is important to us. I chose to give my attention to these girls, to be there for them, to share my version of what was valuable in life.

One day I discovered a secret space underneath the large azalea bush perfect for hiding. We'll read here, I thought when I saw it. It will be our bower.

The Victorian novels I'd devoured as a child always had people reading books in garden bowers. That week, when the girls were coming to play, I spread a soft blanket under the bush and put one of my favorite books there:
The Secret Garden
.

“Look at this perfect hiding spot,” I told them when we had
eaten our fill of berries and swung from the hammock and climbed the trees and the long afternoon shadows were beginning to slant across the grass of the garden. “Why don't we read a book? I have one you might like.”

“It's a little den,” said Abby, as charmed by the setting as I was.

“Can I sit in your lap?” Cate was always fast to claim that spot.

“Of course you can.” We ducked our heads and cozied up on the blanket with Cate on my lap and Abby snuggled to my right, ready to turn the pages, and I began to read the familiar lines about Mary, who was born in India, a peculiar girl with a yellow complexion and sour nature.

“Bugs,”
Abby shrieked. “There are
bugs
in here!” She leapt to her feet, crashing through the bushes and onto the lawn, trying to get away from the small gnat that had crawled onto our blanket.

Cate jumped from my lap and followed.
“I hate bugs. Get them away from me.”

I sighed and followed them. Nowhere in all of those lovely Victorian novels did anyone mention bower bugs.

Late in the summer, when the grass had dried to a crunchy yellow and the garden was festooned with blackberries, the girls and I had a campout. It was almost fall, one of the last weekends of warmth and sunshine we would have. Before the end of the summer, there was one more thing I wanted us to do.

We pitched a tent on the dry grass, lugged sleeping pads and bags, and I gave them each their own flashlight—one shaped like a ladybug, the other like a bumblebee. They were in high spirits with the excitement of sleeping outside, something they had never done. They had pitched the tent in their living room, but this was the real thing.

After dinner we roasted marshmallows, building a small fire in a galvanized metal tub for lack of a proper fire pit. The girls ran off to find sticks, threading their marshmallows and holding them over the fire. They had made s'mores before.

“Tea-tea, why does the fire turn into mosquitoes?” Cate asked.

“What do you mean?”

“See, the fire goes up and turns into bugs.” She pointed to the flames, and I saw what she meant. Tiny bits of ash floated up from the fire and into the shadows. For a moment, as they circled lazily on the updraft, the small flakes did indeed look like roving mosquitoes. Then they disappeared into the darkness, to descend far outside our small circle of light.

In that moment I realized:
These kids did not know fire
.

They had roasted marshmallows before, but over a gas insert in the patio table my brother and sister-in-law had in their backyard. They watched movies in front of a gas fireplace turned on by a switch. When our small campfire blew smoke in their faces, they didn't know why their eyes were stinging. What had been an integral part of my life growing up in a country house heated by a wood-burning stove, was something entirely foreign to them.

How is it possible not to know fire? This is what has sustained our species—allowed us to cook enough calories to develop larger brains, helped us build the tools we needed to survive. And yet, children today were growing up with no knowledge of this elemental substance. Perhaps there were those who saw this as progress; to me it seemed dangerous.

“This is smoke,” I told the girls. “This is ash. This is what happens when you burn wood. This is important.”

Later that night we snuggled into sleeping bags. It was the peak of the Perseid meteor showers, and I left the rain cover off the tent so we could see the night sky. Every August the earth passes the orbital path of a far-off comet. When the debris of this
comet enters the atmosphere, the result is a burst of meteor activity: thousands upon thousands of shooting stars.

I had grown up watching the Perseids at summer camp in the mountains of California. One night we had lain in our sleeping bags in a wide-open meadow and counted thirty-two shooting stars before we finally fell asleep. I wanted the girls to know this wonder, the sight of stars streaking across a dark night sky.

Abby fell asleep immediately, curling up in a tight ball, but Cate and I lay there, eyes open, looking for the trail of light that might signify a meteor.

Suddenly there was flash and motion when before there had been none. “Look, Cate! Do you see it?”

“I see it, Tea-tea.
I see it!
” She wriggled closer in delight, and I wrapped my arms around her, smelling the campfire smoke in her hair. Soon there was another, and another. We counted four before we dozed off, the lateness of the evening finally overcoming us both.

But before she fell asleep entirely, I heard Cate's voice from deep inside her sleeping bag, lazy and slow, almost a whisper.

“Tea-tea. You're my best friend who is a grown-up.”

There it was—just as I had hoped, just as Kim had said it would be.

Magic
.

I
T WAS A LONG
winter of kale and potatoes and onions before we made our way back to the garden. Winter often felt endless in Seattle—day after day of dark gray, the ground soggy, the days short, the garden on hiatus. When local gardeners said, “We're so lucky to be able to grow year-round in the Northwest,” I wanted to laugh. Lucky compared to where? Alaska?

The truth is, not much grows in the winter in Seattle, not even the grass. It's as if the persistent winter drizzle pushes it down. You can keep some kale plants going until spring, perhaps a bit of chard if the frosts aren't too hard and it doesn't snow much. If you've planted your winter vegetables early enough, you may have carrots or beets to tide you over. The collards will continue to produce, at a much slower speed, and you might be able to coax along a cabbage or two, but unless you have a greenhouse, there's not much going on.

I remember a farmers' market stand I once saw in Seattle in
March. The farm itself is large, well established, and respected. From late spring into winter, their stand bursts with gorgeous vegetables and bags of grain, but in March that year, all they had to sell were subscriptions to their summer produce box and a huge pile of parsley. That was it: nothing but parsley.

Don't believe what they say: Late winter in Seattle is slim pickings.

What was growing that winter was our family. The girls had a new baby brother, born in the early days of December. I went to the hospital at the end of his first day and met this tiny thing with clear eyes and a steady gaze.

Who will you be?
I whispered as I took this small bundle into my arms, so tender and warm.
Who will you be in our family?
His name was Graham. With this new arrival, the circle was growing larger.

People complained about the Seattle winter—sometimes even me—but in truth I liked the downtime. I liked not having to go up to the garden, not having to weed or water. Summer is a frenetic period in Seattle. The days are long, the weather good, and residents feel an urge, a compulsion, a
responsibility
, to pack all the fun into two or three months. All the hiking, the camping, the swimming, the sunning, the picnics, the parties, the boating, the lazing. It all must be done in July and August. After that you're living on borrowed time. September could be nice, October even, but any day it could start raining again.

As much as I loved the northwestern summer, I had come to love that it did eventually rain. Finally I could slow down. Finally I could stay home and read books and plan cozy dinner parties. Finally I could hibernate. For all my travel and adventures, it seemed I was a homebody at heart.

When it came to home, however, I was soon to be out of mine. I had sublet a tiny apartment on the top floor of an old brick building with a view of Puget Sound and the sun setting fiery behind the snowcapped Olympic Mountains. It was impractical,
out of my budget, and temporary, but the moment I saw a photo of it, with the sun slanting through large windows and the mullioned panes of the French doors onto hardwood floors, I knew it had to be mine. It was only for nine months. I would make it work.

“It's like a magic carpet ride,” said a friend when she first saw the apartment. With large windows on three sides and the lights of Ballard twinkling below at night, that's exactly how it felt. In the daytime I sat at my desk in the corner between huge windows and watched the sun arc across the sky. Small floatplanes bound for remote islands drifted by my perch, snowcapped mountains carved a jagged horizon across calm waters, and sunset painted the wide expanse in shades of brilliant pink and orange. In those moments I felt as deeply happy as I had ever been.

Come spring the original tenant, who now lived in Europe, offered to let me take over the lease. It was tempting, but the rent was going up, I'd be locked into a yearlong commitment, and I'd begun to have fantasy dreams in which the closet somehow morphed into a bedroom. Though I knew I would miss the view for the rest of my life, I sadly said no. The small studio apartment was a magic carpet ride, not a long-term place to live.

“Why don't you stay here for the summer?” my mom asked one day when we were working in the garden. She was getting ready to leave for Canada and would be gone three months. When she returned, I planned to go to Japan for a long-overdue visit. “You don't
need
a place until November,” she pointed out. “That's six months. Just think of all the money you'll save.”

I sat back on my heels in the garden bed where I had been transplanting and thought about it. I knew immediately I didn't like the idea.

“I don't want to live in
your
house,” I told her. “I want to live in
my
house.”

My mother's house smelled of sandalwood and Japanese indigo dye, an unusual scent that often made westerners wrinkle
their noses; it smelled of
her
. I wanted someplace that smelled like me. No matter how practical, there was something strange about living under my mother's roof at this stage of my life.

“Suit yourself,” she said, “but the garden needs you.”

That was true. The garden needed me. The garden needed a lot.

Almost every day that spring my mother had been out there, hoeing, weeding, planting, working on the three large beds along the south side of the yard. I had begun to think of this area as her private kale garden.

When she gardened she wore old sweatshirts, many of them castoffs from my teen years. The cotton fabric was so faded only I knew what color they had started out as. There were holes sprouting from cuffs, and the hems hung low, yet my mother wore them still.

As a child I had dressed up in her clothes, trying to be a grown-up. Now I was a grown-up—even if I didn't always feel that way—and my mother was wearing the faded remnants of what had been mine. Every time I saw her slight figure at work, a rush of emotion went through me. My tiny mother, so determined, so driven. Even now, at an age when others took up bridge, my mother was working hard. She was a hummingbird, constantly in motion.

“Can't you just sit down so we can have a conversation?” I sometimes asked. “You're
always
working.” It was the same thing I had been saying since childhood.

“My work ethic has really paid off for you over the years,” she'd respond tartly.

I knew what she meant: the private college I attended that she had paid for; the time spent in Europe and at summer camp; the theater tickets and museum visits and piano lessons; the bicycles, computers, and large checks written. She meant a million things, big and small, that she had given my brother and me. Things no one had given her. And here I was, ungrateful.

She took my words as criticism. She never understood their real meaning. She never understood that when I asked her to sit down, when I wanted her to stop working, just for a moment, to talk to me, to look me in the eye, I was saying one thing, over and over.

I want
you
more than I want those other things.
I just want you
.

But she never stopped. She never sat still. There was always something she needed to do. And I never found the words to explain what I really wanted from her, what I needed.

In the prior couple of years, my mother had tried to calm her hummingbird ways. More than once she had declared
this
was the year she was going to slow down. These announcements came as New Year's resolutions or after some injury. She had broken her foot twice now, once running for an airplane, once tripping down the stairs in a rush.

“I really got the message this time,” she told me after a particularly bad injury. “Time to
slow down
.”

But her version of slowing down never looked very different from what had come before. I couldn't tell if there had actually been a change.

“What do you think would happen if you did slow down?” I asked once, in a moment of tenderness between us after a fight, when I felt more like the mom than she did. “What would happen?”

“You know,” she said slowly, all the bluster worn out. “I've been going so fast for so long…” Her voice was low and serious, no drama. “I think if I really did slow down, I might just die.”

My mother's work in the kale garden had paid off that spring. The three broad beds had filled with sprouts of green as the seedlings took root and grew tall. The shiny green leaves of the
pak choi were dark with white veins, the lettuces ruffled like petticoats in shades of rust and speckled lime. The chard unfurled on stems of lurid magenta and goldenrod, and the kale put forth grayish-green leaves so bumpy they reminded me of the topography of a globe. It was a fountain of green in my mother's garden that spring.

What were not plentiful that spring were apartments or houses I wanted to move into. I had fallen in love with my neighborhood and the view that looked toward the Olympic Mountains. After a few years in Seattle surrounded by trees, living in shadow, I knew my happiness over the long winter depended on as much light as I could get and a view of the setting sun. I might be leaving my hilltop perch, but I didn't want to leave the hill.

Permaculture had helped me settle on this neighborhood, a collection of streets lined with small homes and tidy front yards. I had taken the lessons I learned about mapping and flow and drawn routes to all the places in the city I went on a regular basis—farmers' markets, the library, my mother's house, my brother's. There were other things I wanted: a direct bus line downtown, a view toward the west, access to parks and green. When I marked them all on a map, it became clear. I picked the hilly neighborhood right in the middle and was surprised by how happy I felt there. There was no effort in my life any longer; everything I needed was close at hand. It was an ease I hadn't previously known. Always before life had felt like hard work.

There were other old buildings on the hill, full of the vintage details I loved, and I put my name on the waiting list for the next available space in one of them. The units were bigger there—a small dining room in addition to bedroom and living room. It wasn't the magic carpet ride, but it would do.

While I waited I looked. The neighborhood was filled with small Craftsman houses: long on charm but too large for one
person and more than I wanted to pay. As my springtime departure grew closer, I looked harder. There were rental units in some of these houses, but usually they were converted basements. Winter in Seattle was dark and damp enough without living underground. I did not want to become a mole.

“You're
sure
you don't want to live here for the summer?” my mother offered again.

I was sure, but as months ticked by and I still didn't find anything, I began to reconsider. Maybe I could live in the garden cottage. I could put my desk there and write with a view of blooming flowers and fruit trees.

I imagined wandering out to pull weeds when faced with a particularly tricky passage that needed some pondering. When I had research to do, I could read in the hammock. I wouldn't be living in my mother's house—I would be living in the garden. Then I would be off to Japan. With the money I would save, I could stay longer, travel more.

It wasn't ideal—but it was practical. And from summers spent working as a wilderness instructor, I was used to throwing things in storage for the season; I'd spent months living in a tent. Surely the cottage would not be so bad. And as my mother said, the garden needed me.

A month before my lease was up, the woman from whom I rented the apartment returned to move her belongings out of the studio with the view. My mother was out of town, so I stayed at her house for the week, a trial run of sorts. I didn't bother to set up the cottage.

But staying at my mother's house meant sleeping in the upstairs guest bedroom, a poky space facing the street with high windows that were long and narrow. After the wide view and huge picture windows of my apartment, it felt closed in, like sleeping in a coffin. I hated it.

I spent most of my time in the downstairs room my mother had converted to her office. It had a view out large windows
looking down the hill to the cottage and the field below. In late spring, it was a glorious sight.

The magnolia was festooned with blossoms—magenta on the outside, a pale shell-pink on the velvety interior. The irises and tulips were giving up their bright colors, deep purple shriveling up into a dried golden husk. The raspberries were covered with tiny white blossoms, and carrots that had been started from seed were pushing feathery green tops out of damp soil. To watch tiny seeds cleave soil took my breath away—all that life somehow emerging from a speck of brown. It seemed miraculous. It was.

I sat there, at my mother's desk, and took it all in.

I had never spent the night at Orchard House; I had never seen the garden at dawn. Within a day or two, I started sleeping downstairs, on a foldout futon in the office, so I could see morning break over the garden. From where I slept, I had a view down the lawn all the way to the orchard and the houses beyond. One of them had small white lights strung on its back deck. At night they twinkled and looked like the fairies I had imagined as a child. The whole scene felt like it was touched by magic.

In the mornings I opened my eyes to an entirely different landscape. There was fog some mornings. The tall cedars wrapped in mist looked ghostly and beautiful. Some days were clear and sunny, still cool in the morning when I took my cup of tea out on the patio and prepared to start my day. Some days I took a blanket with me, to wrap around bare feet as I sat there in silence. The only sounds were the chickens clucking and crowing in the neighbor's yard next door. Though the house lay within Seattle city limits, it felt miles away.

One morning I woke up to hazy white covering the garden, on the grass and the plants. I blinked, not believing what I was seeing. Was it frost? It couldn't be—not in late May. Was it
snow
?