Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow (15 page)

I took the plastic tub to the stove and filled a saucepan with water, spooning in as much curry as I could stand. I added bouillon as well and rummaged in the cupboard for a packet of rice noodles. I set another pot of water to boil.

As the saucepan simmered on the stove, I left the kitchen and went outside, slowly making my way into the garden. In my free hand, I carried a pair of scissors.

Across the grass lay the kale beds—an assortment of greens my mother had planted and tended. I clipped floppy leaves of chard, long green chives, and ferny bits of cilantro already beginning to bolt. I cut pak choi and tender sprigs of broccoli. I gathered them together and carried them back into the kitchen: the yield of my mother's efforts, a bouquet of green in my hands.

In the kitchen, I washed the greens quickly, cut them roughly, and stirred them into the simmering broth. As the leaves wilted into the steamy soup, I removed the pot from the
heat. I drained the noodles and added them, with a tiny bit of fish sauce for saltiness, some lime for sour.

I poured the whole thing into a bowl and wrapped my hands around the warmth of it. I leaned forward into the sour-tanged steam and tried to breathe deep. When I sipped the broth, the heat and fiery chilies began to open my long-clogged nose and chest. Though my taste buds were muffled, I sensed lemongrass, the sharpness of lime. Soft noodles slipped down a throat that ached from coughing, and the greens were chewy and tender. I knew they were good for me.

My mother wasn't there to comfort me—she had rarely been able to give me what I needed. But here was a garden of vegetables she had worked hard to grow. Now, when I needed it most, she was nourishing me. She couldn't give me herself. Instead she had given me the tools to be strong on my own. Perhaps that was her greatest gift to me: resilience and strength, the ability to survive.

Maybe this is how my mother loves me. Maybe this is the best she can do
.

I drank down the entire bowl of soup, chewing the soft noodles and toothy greens. I ate another bowlful and went back to bed. The next day I made more, picking more greens from the garden. The supply there seemed endless.

I made that green noodle curry over and over, for weeks on end, until I was fully well again. I never grew tired of it.

I
HADN
'
T INVITED FRIENDS
to the garden. Not really. Knox and Kim had taken tours, given feedback, and been on their way. I hadn't invited anyone over just to hang out. This was not surprising. I'd spent a lifetime not inviting people over.

I had learned early, from neighborhood children, that my house was weird. We had no television, no candy, no cool toys. None of the neighborhood kids wanted to come to our house to play. They told me so.

Our house was filled with Asian carpets and calligraphy done by Buddhist masters. There were no comfortable chairs, no places to lounge. I longed for a house with wall-to-wall carpeting and a boring beige sofa set. Boring was safe.

There was usually no mom at our house—and when she was there, she was a liability. My mother was more likely to dole out carob-studded trail mix and unsweetened apple juice than cookies or lemonade. She might try to give you tofu or seaweed. Her
eccentricities made us stick out. Her refusal to fit in became a burden for which I did not have her strength.

As I got older things shifted, never for the better. The occasional high school friend who came to visit widened their eyes at tatami-mat floors and the Asian art that decorated the home my mother had created.
“What is that smell?”
they whispered, picking up the ancient, unfamiliar scent of indigo dye. The truly unlucky asked about the bamboo whisks lined up on the kitchen windowsill.

“They're used to make ceremonial green tea,” my mother explained, seeming delighted to have been asked. “Would you like some?”

I kicked my friend under the table, gestured behind my mother's back—I shook my head. “It's
really bitter
,” I warned.

My mother brushed away my concerns. “It's not so bitter.”

Too often the friend said yes, and my mother selected a handmade bowl and carefully measured out powdered green tea using a tiny bamboo scoop. Tea ceremony is an agonizingly slow process, and I cringed through every deliberate moment. My mother whisked the powder into warm water until it was a frothy mixture of brilliant green that tasted deeply of grass. Each friend who fell into this trap took a single sip before coughing and sputtering, taken aback by a concoction so strongly flavored it's meant to be served with tooth-aching sweets for balance. My mother never bothered with that part.

Couldn't she see she was only making things worse?

I wanted a mother who asked about school or drama club or the cross-country team—who showed genuine interest in her daughter's life and this new friend. Why couldn't she put me first?

Some friends seemed taken by the exoticism of a visit to my house—so very different from their own homes. They were curious about a mother who did not serve on the PTA or work as a real estate agent or dental hygienist. My mother had been far
more adventurous with her life than most women of her generation.

But I didn't want to be a curio. I wanted friends to be able to open the fridge and get a snack without fear of what they might find there, collapse on a sofa, put their feet up on a coffee table.

There were no coffee tables in our house. What little furniture we had was arranged around the edges of a large Chinese carpet. The center of the room was vacant. In the place where there should have been comfort, there was only emptiness.

My solution was to hide my family from the outside world—dividing life into separate categories of school and home. I defended the boundaries like my survival might depend on it. Sometimes it felt like it did.

I stole the notification postcards for back-to-school nights out of the mailbox. I lied when necessary—
my mom's out of town; I'm not allowed to have friends over
. If my mother ever wondered why she wasn't being called to school to meet my teachers, why I didn't have friends over to play, she never mentioned it.

As I grew up and had homes of my own, I overcompensated. I read etiquette books and cocktail guides and lists of suggestions for how to be a relaxed hostess (
put out your serving platters the night before the party; make sure to relax with a drink and preselected music twenty minutes before your guests arrive
). I bought tablecloths with matching napkins, sets of glasses for different types of wine. But none of the books held the answers I really needed: how to feel okay with letting people see who I was.

This sometimes called for heroic measures. Other people clean before company comes over—I've been known to purchase entirely new furniture. The words of the neighborhood kids still rang in my ears.

The things I bought never covered up the fear that I was doing domesticity wrong. My mother hadn't been taught—her own mother had died too early. And my grandmother's mother
had died early as well. I was the third generation to be raised feral, making it up as we went along.

But in fundamental ways, we were different. My mother saw she would never fit in
—and decided not to
. She had blazed her own path, to Asia and an unconventional life. I was the opposite. Not fitting in made me want it more. I craved the safety and the validation of the group.

In some ways I marveled at her—how strong to walk away, to not care what other people thought. In other ways it seemed inhuman. Even animals are dependent on the group for survival; no one makes it on his own; the lone wolf is actually a myth.

Sometimes I wondered if my mother's unconventional choices were her billboard to a cruel world:
I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU THINK OF ME
. Had she chosen to walk away, or did she withdraw early to avoid failure? Were my mother's eccentricities a strength, or just the way she covered up her own vulnerabilities? I knew from my own life that it's easier to pretend you don't want the thing you cannot have.

I feared rejection as well. The isolation and lack of community I had been raised with made me feel—not that I was doing things wrong, but that I
was
wrong. I feared opening up my home would reveal all my messy, broken bits, all the ways I continually failed. If anyone got close enough to see, I was sure they wouldn't want to know me.

After years of shutting people out, how could I possibly let them in?

I hadn't planned on the raspberries.

The new garden had a berry patch, a large and neglected plot. We hadn't noticed them at first because they were overgrown with weeds. The first year the plants seemed stunted, shorter than I was used to and anemic looking, without much in the
way of fruit. At the end of the summer, I cut back the old canes, thinned them out, and piled up dried leaves around the roots as mulch, to protect them and enrich the soil. The next summer they grew taller, bushier. By April they were covered with tiny white blossoms.

Things felt good in the garden that spring, even if I still felt awkward in my mother's house. I had survived the onslaught of greens, the baskets of kale and chard, the lettuce and arugula that thrived in the unusually rainy spring we'd had that year. As June turned into July, the weather finally warmed up; peas began to flower and form; the raspberries came ripe.

That first June morning was a revelation: walking out to the garden in pajamas and bare feet
to pick breakfast
. The grass was damp with dew, the cilantro in delicate white flower, lettuces all shades of snappy green and speckled rusty reds. There, standing behind them at chest level, was the thicket of raspberries.

I approached the jungle of green leaves, loaded with clusters so heavy the stalks had begun to droop. I remembered the wonder I'd had as a child in my mother's berry patch: these tiny thimbles, like hats for fairy children. Each one was a collection of even smaller spheres held together as if by magic. When I put the first berry in my mouth, it collapsed at the slightest pressure into a burst of tart sweetness. Ah,
raspberries
.

Each morning I waded into the berry patch, trying to avoid damaging the thin canes. Each morning I picked and picked, filling two quart-sized plastic containers to the brim. I ate berries for breakfast with yogurt, berries for snacks midday, berries for dessert after dinner.

I'd always thought berry picking a treat. I'd never thought of it as a chore, an obligation. But that summer I discovered when berries are ready to be picked
—they must be picked
. Especially the delicate raspberries. When it rained they began to mold on the stalk and were wasted.

By the second week of picking, I was sick of raspberries. Really and truly sick of them, something I had not thought was possible. I didn't want to see another raspberry for a long time. But what to do with them? They kept coming.

I stashed quarts in the freezer for my mother when she came home at the end of the summer, but freezer space was limited. I made jam, but still the berries kept coming. I made raspberry curd and raspberry cordial, for an
Anne of Green Gables
picnic with friends, but still the berries kept coming. It was time to branch out into baked goods. Even though I was not much of a baker, I decided it was time to bake a pie.

I entered the kitchen that afternoon with trepidation. Pies scare me. There's technique involved in getting a flaky crust. Torn piecrust seemed irreparable, the ice water never cold enough. What if the dough didn't come together? What if it looked lopsided and sad? Cakes can be disguised with frosting; pies are naked in their homely beauty.

I shouldn't have been as worried as I was. I might not be much of a baker, but I knew people who were—people like my friend Kate.

Kate McDermott taught pie making around the world; I had taken her class several years before. It hadn't made me a baker, but it had given me some perspective on the art of pies. Mostly I had been taken by her attitude.

“I make ugly pies,” she told me. “They don't have to look perfect.”

That day Kate had ably patched ripped piecrust, shoring up weak spots where the dough had been rolled too thin. She didn't think it needed to be perfect. “Just fix any mistakes you make,” she said without concern. “It doesn't matter.”

Kate's approach was breezy and relaxed. She barely followed a recipe. “See how it feels,” she told me. “Trust yourself.” As I ran my hands through the butter cut into flour, I felt emboldened.
Things didn't have to be perfect. Kate seemed at peace with imperfections, her pies beautiful in their rustic uniqueness, no two ever the same.

Perhaps the secret was finding comfort in the way things were: a process of accepting rather than hiding.

The irony was that I liked it when other people let me see them as they truly were: less-than-perfect houses, disordered garages, overdue library books. The imperfections in my friends' lives didn't make me like them any less
—they made me like them more
. I felt more comfortable with the flaws in my own life, more intimately connected to them; it made me feel like family.

I knew this intellectually, but it was harder to apply. I might be able to appreciate rustic charm in a pie, to enjoy the comfortable clutter of a friend's house, but I held myself to a higher standard—one I never managed to achieve. My friends didn't have to be perfect. I just couldn't give myself that same compassion.

But rolling out and patching the rips in my pie dough that afternoon, as Kate had shown me, I began to wonder if there might not be another way. And when I pulled the pie out of the oven, bumpy, irregular, burnished and glossy and smelling like raspberry heaven, for a moment I thought it was beautiful. My beautifully imperfect pie.

I hadn't counted on the fact that you cannot eat a pie on your own. You can try, but by the time you finish it, you won't like pie any longer. If you draw it out over days—a slice here and there—it will go soggy and unappealing. Pie begs to be shared. It is the most sociable of desserts.

Sharing pie would involve inviting friends over to the garden, something I had not planned on. I couldn't entertain them elsewhere—I no longer had a place of my own. It would have to be the garden. The messy, weedy, out-of-control garden.

I might have survived the onslaught of spring greens, but I had not survived the onslaught of weeds. The bindweed had woken up and was twining and twisting up everything that stood: fence slats, trees, azalea bushes, sturdy kale plants.

“Is there anything you can do about bindweed?” I asked a friend of mine who had a farm in California. I was getting desperate.

“Nope,” she said. “Bindweed is like herpes—you just gotta live with it.”

I was coming to think that bindweed was something that ought to be disclosed on real estate contracts—along with foundation damage and a history of flooding. Potential buyers should be warned.

I tried to keep on top of the bindweed, but it was impossible. And then there was the lawn.

We'd had an argument about that lawn, my mother and I. She was all for letting the grass grow. This lawn that had been carefully tended for decades, that had once been like velvet nap with mower lines—she wanted it all wild.

I was in favor of keeping the lawn. “The kids need someplace to play.”

“You can have this part.” She gestured to the far upper section, near the patio, a tiny strip.

“That's not enough; they need more space.”

“They're not
that big
.”

“But they're growing—and that's not enough space to run through the sprinklers or play croquet. We need room to be able to string a badminton net.”

“Fine. You can have the upper section for lawn, but I'm letting the field go.”

Thus the yard was partitioned: my upper play area, my mother's meadow in the distance, a riot of wild grasses that now grew waist-high.

But I hadn't counted on the upkeep a lawn required. I had
neither time nor equipment to mow or edge the grass, and the dandelions that grew in my mother's meadow blew their seed over to colonize. By midsummer they were stretching up sunshiny faces. I occasionally weedwacked them down, but they grew back, shorter the second time. I felt sure they were mocking me.