Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow (21 page)

I
N THE YEARS WHEN
I was trying to decide between Seattle and San Francisco, I heard a speech given by a chef—Dan Barber of the Blue Hill restaurants in New York. He told of visiting an award-winning foie gras producer in Spain who didn't cage or force-feed his geese. They roamed and gorged themselves on crops he grew. What fencing he had was electrified on the outside only—to keep predators away. He did nothing to keep his animals in.

One day Barber and the farmer were in the fields when a flock of wild geese flew overhead. The farmer's geese began to honk, and the wild geese honked back, and suddenly the wild geese made a wide, sweeping turn and landed in the field with the farmer's geese.

Barber was amused. “They come for a visit?”

“No,” the farmer said. “They come to stay.”

Barber knew the DNA of a goose is programmed to make
them fly south in the winter and north in the summer. How could they suddenly change generations of evolution and stay at the farm?

When he asked this, the farmer shook his head. “Their DNA is to find the conditions that are conducive to life, to happiness,” he said. “They find it here.”

For me that story rang like the clear, high note of a bell. It was the best summation I'd heard of that thing we all look for—in a relationship, a job, a home. We are seeking
the conditions of our greatest happiness
. It is what we are programmed to do.

In trying to decide if I should stay in San Francisco or gamble on what I might be able to build in Seattle, I had made endless pro and con lists. But Barber's story made me realize it was time to make a new list. What were the conditions of my greatest happiness? Where was I more likely to find what I needed most?

When I did this, the results were surprising. Hidden in the list, the same concept came up over and over; it was something I hadn't truly considered before.

Community
.

For all its woes and heartbreak, for every flea-beetle-eaten leaf of arugula and withered seedling, gardening is a fairly straightforward thing. Nature will always throw curve balls—the unexpected late frost, the summer of drought—but in other ways the process is not mysterious. If you want to grow a sunflower, you plant a sunflower seed and make sure to water it adequately. A strawberry plant will, in most cases, give you strawberries. The instructions are there. How well you execute them is up to you.

Community, however, is a harder thing to grow. What seeds do you plant? How do you water? Books have been written about the micronutrients you need in your soil, the recommended balance of ingredients for a compost pile, but human
life is a more complicated and variable thing. How do you find your people? How do you weave the sort of net you need—one you can cling to in hard times, one that will catch you if you fall?

My first summer in Seattle I wasn't looking for community. I had come to get away, to work on a book, to play with my nieces. I had exactly three friends in the city—enough to provide some social interaction but not enough to take me away from my work. I went for long walks and even longer bike rides and was happy with this smaller existence. It felt like a vacation from real life. I knew it was temporary.

Then I met a neighbor—a single mom with twin daughters just entering their teens. It was she who showed me how to mound up the raked leaves around my new raspberry bushes to mulch them. When I needed to get the large dining table I had bought home, she volunteered her minivan and wouldn't accept money for it. She invited me on berry-picking excursions in the country, and once or twice, when she knew I was racing a big deadline and consumed with work, she showed up on my doorstep in the early evening with a covered plate of whatever she had made her own family that night. “I know you're busy,” she said. “Now you don't have to worry about making dinner.”

I had never experienced anything like that. I had taken my neighbor to the emergency room when he was sick and needed to go, but it never would have occurred to me to make dinner for him. Seattle was a city, but sometimes it felt more like a village.

Not everyone experiences the warmth I found in Seattle. The city is known for a polite but sometimes frosty demeanor—people are friendly, but it can be hard to break through to actual friendship. They call it the Seattle Freeze, and there are many theories about the cause. Some speculate it goes back to the reserved personalities of Nordic settlers in the region; others point to the weather and annual hibernation that keeps people within
their own social groups; still others cite studies that show Washingtonians to be some of the most introverted people in the nation. The rise of modern-day tech culture in the city probably doesn't help.

This was not my experience. The first winter I spent in Seattle, a man I had written a brief article about heard I was arriving in November and planning to stay the winter. “We must have you over,” he emailed. “Otherwise you won't meet anyone until spring.” That man became my friend Knox.

That first winter Knox invited me to a soup-swap party—an idea born when he grew tired of making big pots of soup and eating leftovers for a week. He figured his friends must be in the same situation and invited people over to swap their soup. When he put up a website, word spread; the event is now celebrated around the world.

That evening his house was crowded with friends, the windows steamy, rain jackets discarded on the porch. Everyone brought containers of frozen soup they'd made, and horse trading of sorts occurred, with people bragging about secret family recipes or tempting ingredients, the competition good-natured and humorous. Afterward we ate tacos in the kitchen, and I went home that night with six containers of soup made by people I did not know.

I doled the soup out over the next few months, each time marveling at how comforting it was to have food I had not made myself. It felt different than takeout. Someone had stirred this soup in their own kitchen. They had labored over it with all good intentions. And somewhere else in the city, someone was eating soup I had made.

Perhaps food was the key that unlocked the city for me. My first friends in Seattle were food writers, and through them I met more: writers and restaurateurs and enthusiastic home cooks. Food people are some of the most generous you can find—mostly they just want to feed you. There were picnics and potlucks
and excursions to sample a new restaurant or café. Eventually I found myself invited into a club where we cooked from the same cookbook and gathered to share the results.

The first meeting I attended was a blur. We met at the home of one of the members. There were a dozen women, a few babies or toddlers. I knew only the woman who had invited me, but we had all cooked Diana Kennedy's Mexican food and sat together chatting and laughing for a few hours, a break from life and weekend responsibilities. Within the group were various connections and deeper friendships, but everyone was kind and friendly, and I went home having enjoyed my afternoon.

I was beginning to realize that friendship and community are not the same thing. Friendships are threads between people, either strong or tenuous, but community is a web. In San Francisco I'd had plenty of friends, but over time they slowly moved out of the city to far-flung suburbs for jobs or houses or better schools. They were still my friends, but I was losing my sense of community. I no longer had Paul living up the street, Michelle down by the park, Matt and Mireya a bike ride away. When I dreamed of gathering people around a table, it was community that I longed for.

It seemed to me that, these days, money often took the place of community. I could hire movers rather than asking friends, or order in soup or have tissues and prescriptions delivered when I was sick, rather than bothering someone I knew. The making of money also interfered with community—sometimes it felt like I was working so hard that I didn't have time for the kindness I might want to give. I sometimes wondered if, with money, we were chasing a false god, one that could not give us what we truly needed.

As our lives have changed, community sometimes now lived online. I could tell social media that I was sick and get responses of sympathy—from former work colleagues or people I went to high school with but haven't seen for years. It was nice, but it
wasn't the same. I was connected electronically to people all over the world, but I didn't know the names of the people who lived across the street from me. If I needed to go to the hospital, my friends in London would not be able to help.

I'm not sure what it was about Seattle that made it feel different—the long winters, the rugged pioneer spirit passed down through history, the geography that puts it far away from almost everything else in the country. Or perhaps it was the economic boom-and-bust cycle. Seattle had known rough times, the sort that make people stick together.

Whatever it was, I liked it. Washington wasn't the rolling golden hills and dark oak trees of Northern California. The snowcapped mountains surprised me when I caught a glimpse of them; they stunned me silent. I was still unaccustomed to having to wait so long for spring. But in other ways—in ways that really mattered—it felt like home. It wasn't the home I had grown up in, but Seattle fit me. I felt grounded here.

Then there was the funny thing, the thing that felt almost mystical. My father had come from Washington, he had been born here. Though I knew almost nothing of his early life, I had researched his family enough to know that they had come to Washington in the 1800s. In the state capitol in Olympia, there was a portrait of my great-grandfather, a member of the Washington state legislature in 1925.

When I helped my mother pack up her garage that day in California, we had found books that belonged to my father, from classes he had taken at the University of Washington. His Seattle address was neatly written on the inside cover:
Brooklyn Avenue
. It was a name I knew well. It was the cross street to where my brother lived.

In a vast world of places my brother could have ended up, he had made his way to Seattle and bought a house just a few blocks away from where his own father had lived. A father he had never known. It was like those monarch butterflies whose descendants
migrate back to the same breeding grounds, though the grandchildren themselves have never been there. Somehow they just know.

Perhaps, in ways that far exceeded my understanding, we were all just making our way home.

The cookbook club met every other month, each time in someone's home. In late November we made Indian food, gathering together on an afternoon when most people were battling holiday lines in shopping malls. There was a Persian food fest one rainy spring, where the colors of the dried fruit hinted at blossoms yet to come. Our Julia Child feast included more butter than anyone cared to admit, and for a January cocktail party, we all dressed up and clinked glasses in a member's condo overlooking the twinkling lights of the city. By the end of that evening, we were sitting around the edge of the indoor swimming pool, fancy shoes long discarded, feet dangling in the water, talking and laughing. It felt like an evening that would sparkle in memory for years to come.

There were offshoot events as well: apple picking in the fall, weekend coffee-shop gatherings to craft and chat, an occasional dinner party or camping trip. Postcards flew back and forth between members with surprising regularity. If I mentioned I was sick, there were offers to bring soup, tissues, orange juice.

I was coming to realize that regularity was one of the keys to community—gathering together, telling our stories, keeping in touch. For some people, attending religious service works in the same way, or team sports, or regular visits to the community center or the coffee shop or the pub—people find comfort where they may. Warmth and connection grow with repetition; the reason for the gathering is almost immaterial.

One September evening we sat at a long backyard table lit by candles, and I looked around at these women. In the period we
had known each other, there had been babies born, jobs lost and won, hard times with parents, breakups, minor breakdowns: life, in all its sweetness and sorrow. Through it all, every other month, we had shown up with our covered dishes, ready to share. Sometimes the cookbook felt like just an excuse to gather.

Now, when I rode my bike back from the garden, I passed the homes of people I knew—Martine, Lucia, Megan and Sam, Naomi and Brett, Kate, Renee, Jess and Jim. It felt cozy, as if the city was honeycombed with people I cared about.

I hadn't grown up with this, and perhaps that is why it mattered so much to me. My mother didn't have community when my brother and I were young—I'm not sure she realized it was an option. There's a give-and-take that happens in community that she didn't seem to have figured out. Perhaps she never had the time.

The garden was teaching me about giving—and about surplus. I had planted two artichokes the first spring. One made it; the other withered due to my own lack of attention. Knox gave me a third artichoke when he was dividing the plants in his yard. The first year or two they didn't do much, beside produce outrageously large silver-gray foliage that smelled a little piney, a little like a tomato plant. The leaves grew so large they blocked the path. They looked primeval. Every so often I had to hack them back just to get through.

Over time, however, they began to produce. The first flush yielded thirty-four artichokes, and there was more to come. I harvested them small and cooked them with potatoes and white wine and parsley, an Italian recipe from my friend Luisa's family, but there were too many to keep up with. When I mentioned this, the artichoke lovers in cookbook club raised their hands. A few weeks later I tucked some into Martine's mailbox and left a few more in a package with Kairu's doorman.

“I never knew artichokes had a scent,” Martine wrote me in a note afterward.