Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow (8 page)

“Do you want to eat on the deck?” I called across the wide upper lawn, as my mother sat back on her heels under the magnolia tree.

“No, bring it over here.” She stood up, peeling off her garden gloves, and walked over to the cracked patio in front of the cottage. “I've been taking my breaks here. On sunny days the pavement soaks up the heat, and you can actually feel warm for a second.”

I hadn't seen my mother take a break, maybe ever, but I held my tongue.

We sat down cross-legged on the patio, and I passed her a bowl full of the flavors I knew she liked: sour, tart, bitter.

“This is
good
,” my mother said, fishing red radicchio leaves out of her bowl with the chopsticks she prefers to use.

“A friend made something similar for me. I thought you would like it.”

“Yes. It's very good.”

“Are you going to see the rest of the family for Mother's Day?” Ever since my brother had kids of his own, Mother's Day
had changed. He now spent the day celebrating his wife, which often left me feeling protective of our mother.
“She's still your mom,”
I nagged him on the phone, in a bossy big-sister sort of way. “You have to do something for her.”

“Your brother stopped by with flowers early this morning.”

“Really?”

She laughed a short, wry laugh. “He took the kids down to Pike Place Market and bought three bouquets—one for me, one for his mother-in-law, one for his wife. I was the second delivery of the day.”

“Well. That's better than nothing.”

“Yes,” she said slowly. “It's better than nothing.”

I stretched my legs out on the patio, which was indeed slightly warm, a comforting support on a still-chilly spring day. My mother wiped up the last bits of vinegary dressing before she too put down her bowl and stretched out.

“You know,” she said. “Remember how you asked me why I thought you had Down syndrome when you were born?”

That conversation had been months before, but of course I remembered.

“I've been thinking about it—and I don't think it had anything to do with you.”

“What do you mean?”

My mother moved her legs, rearranged her sitting position next to me, both of us looking up into the clear blue sky.

“It was me,” she said plainly.

I glanced over at her—gray hair pulled messily back in a headband, sun on her now-wrinkled face.

“I don't understand.”

She sighed long and slow, a sound like air escaping from a tire.

“The reason I thought you had Down syndrome didn't have anything to do with you.” She paused, her hand going up to
smooth hair back into the headband before she continued, her voice small and sad.

“You were perfect
—I
was the problem. I just couldn't believe anything that came from me wouldn't have something wrong with it.”

W
E ALL SAW DIFFERENT
things when we looked at the garden. My mother saw the ability to grow food—a place for her grandchildren to run wild, an insurance policy if times got hard. The house was big; the orchard would provide. Having such a garden was about as self-sufficient as one could be in the city. If the worst came to pass, we might all be able to live on apples and kale.

The girls saw play. They saw hills to roll down and pears to pick and the loft of a cottage to climb into. They saw places to hide and seek, berries to gobble, and a sprinkler to run through on hot summer days.

My brother saw obligation. He saw work. “That's a lot of lawn I'm going to have to mow,” he said the first time he saw the garden.

My sister-in-law saw leisure. She saw relaxation. “With a yard this big, you could put in a swimming pool,” she told my mother. “Wouldn't that be great?”

I saw those things, but I saw something more. I saw possibility.

I hoped this would be a place to bring us together. I saw long Sunday dinners at an outdoor table, churning ice cream together in the summer. I saw us decorating bare winter branches for the birds, with birdseed balls and strings of popcorn, the way my brother and I had when we were kids.

I saw the possibility of us being more to each other, of growing together. I saw a place for us to become a family.

I just wasn't sure how to get there from here. Growing vegetables I understood, but how do you grow a family?

“Why do you think you get along so well?” I once asked my friend Paul's sister. I was making a study of families, trying to see what held them together. My friend Paul's family was high on my list.

Paul is one of three kids. There are two parents, and though I am sure they have their moments, they tease each other and laugh and generally seem to get along. The kids spend time together even without the parents, even when it's not a national holiday or family birthday, even without a guilt trip. Paul likes to hang out with his mom and dad. They genuinely enjoy each other's company.

Other people enjoy their company as well. The door is often opened to friends. I've spent Christmas with them, Easter, the Fourth of July. Paul's dad will make you a drink, and his mom will chat with you about this and that, and before you know it, everyone is sitting in the backyard laughing. Entire afternoons pass with a few good jokes and a lot of gab.

Paul's sister Michelle thought for a moment before answering my question, but not for long.

“It all goes back to when Paul was in his coma,” she said. “We realized how easy it would be to lose him and decided not to sweat the small stuff. Life is too short.”

She was referring to the day after Thanksgiving, many years ago, when fifteen-year-old Paul and his friends went running down the mountain we both grew up at the base of, a wild and beautiful place. They called it bush crashing—jumping off outcroppings, barreling down meadows, skidding through trees, letting out the pent-up energy of teen boys. A little bit of danger, a whole lot of fun.

At one point Paul jumped off a cornice and landed wrong. His legs buckled beneath him, both ankles broken, and he began to roll down a hill that got steeper and steeper. His body gathered momentum with each revolution, faster and faster, until the force flung him off a cliff and he landed in a rocky creek bed.

His friends raced to where his body lay. They were both trained Boy Scouts. One ran to the fire station in a nearby town to get help. The other stayed behind, ripping up his jeans to make splints and bandages, watching over Paul and waiting for grown-ups to come. They got him to the hospital in what is called
the golden hour
—the short period of time after a brain injury before the swelling has done too much damage.

At the hospital, doctors put Paul in a medically induced coma. There was talk he might not make it, that he might be mentally compromised. The family was terrified. The hair on Paul's father's head turned gray overnight.

The doctors had a hard time bringing Paul out of the coma. For two weeks his life hung in the balance. Prayer vigils were held at his school and in church. Catholic relics were brought to his hospital room in hopes of a miracle. Then, one day, with his sister sitting by his hospital bed, Paul opened his eyes. From there he made a stunning recovery, returning home in time for Christmas.

“Once we had him back,” Michelle said, “we promised not to screw it up.”

When I ask Paul, he agrees. “We were falling apart,” he says, “always fighting—we'd even started family counseling. We had
one session before the accident. But a crisis puts things in perspective. After that we were tight.”

Would it take something like that to bring my family together?

When we were growing up, people often assumed my brother and I were twins. We were both lanky, with a coltish look and cowlicks that sent our wispy blond hair in odd directions. We had the same big eyes we hadn't yet grown into. In the early years, it was clear he was younger, but as our size difference evened out, people often asked if we were just siblings or perhaps actually twins.

“No,” I would reply, outraged. “I'm
two and a half years
older!”

It wasn't the two and a half years that made the difference, though. We might have looked alike, but we had been born into different worlds. I was the daughter of two parents, planned and anticipated. Two and a half years later, my brother was born into a family in shambles, an uncertain future. He had only one parent—and not even all of her.

And he had me: a sister, not much older, who quickly became his second mother. I was his greatest protector and his biggest bully but never his friend.

I don't remember the moment I first saw my brother. I remember drawing rainbows on construction paper with a babysitter the day my mother was in the hospital having the baby. It is perhaps my earliest memory. The crude lines, the tacky feeling of the wax crayons, the sunlight on our deck that May morning. Beyond that there is nothing.

I don't know how my mother found that house, or how she paid for it, or who hung the swing from the eaves so it dangled over the deck, but we have pictures of me swinging in it not long after my brother was born. In the photos he is wrapped in
a blanket that had been knitted for me by my father's mother. Two and a half years later she was dead, my father was gone, and there was no communication or support for us from him or his family.

When I speak of my childhood, I often say we grew up like wild wolves. It is at once a joke and not a joke. How does one explain the collision of needs, anger, deprivation, desire, resentment, and hungry love that all came crashing together in that small house in the country? How does one tell of a mother who had never been mothered, a father who wasn't even a memory, and two children who learned to adapt at all costs? It is a story hard and horrid: We were each our best and worst selves.

Had there been money, community, family—had there been religion, even—it might have been easier. But none of that existed for us. We were on our own, growling and wrestling and marking our territory.

People who knew us then—neighbors, other parents at our school—will tell you that, individually, my brother and I were the most pleasant children. We minded our manners and offered to set and clear the table. We helped with dishes without being asked. They were delighted to have us for sleepovers and invited us on their family vacations; their own children behaved better when we were around.

The dark side of that shiny penny is the way we were with each other, something most people never saw. Some families bind together to survive difficult times—forming a solid unit to defend against what is hard and hopeless. We were not like that. I was hungry for approval and attention and looked outward, not inward. Perhaps I could tell, even then, that the center wouldn't hold. I leaned toward other people; I tried to be what they wanted of me; that was how I got fed. My brother was competition for resources scarce or nonexistent.

“You were so mean to your brother,” my mother often says—as if a two-year-old had charge of her emotions. My
brother arrived only months after my father left, taking up what little was left of my mother's attention and making me responsible in ways for which I was not prepared. When I took a blanket to cover up the baby, I covered his head as well, as if I could make him disappear entirely.

If I had been older, perhaps I could have done better, been a bigger person. Perhaps then my brother and I would have been on the same team. But I was two when he was born, and my needs were stronger than my maturity. They were an icy cold creature that clawed at me from the inside.

And yet my mother's words haunt me, they sting. The distance my brother keeps, his disinclination toward our family—it feels as though it is my fault. I sometimes wonder if I should apologize to him, if I should tell him how sorry I am for failing him.

My hands were just too small to hold the pieces together.

There was no expectation for my brother to be part of the garden. He could have been, if he wanted—our mother would have been overjoyed. But he was busy with work and his own family and had never shown any interest in digging or weeding. We had both run wild in our childhood garden, plucking asparagus from the dirt to eat raw, climbing trees to pick the new apples that tasted sweet and clean, but my brother felt no need to coax food from the soil.

A good weekend for him was spent with his wife and children on their new boat, or swimming at the country club. My brother worked in high tech and was a natty dresser. He didn't want to get his hands dirty.

My mother made him promise to mow the lawn a few times a year and he reluctantly agreed, but it would be an obligation to him, a resentment perhaps, never a pleasure. We were of the same family, but never on the same team.

His wife did like to garden. In fact she loved it. When I first met my sister-in-law, she was the only person I knew who was my age and interested in growing things. Her knowledge of flower names was impressive.

It was from her that I learned—after years of reading the name in books—what a primrose looked like. I expected such a romantic name to be attached to a more impressive flower and was disappointed to find primroses sturdy and pedestrian, cheerful but uninspiring. I promptly decided to forget this newfound knowledge.

Like my mother, my sister-in-law used the proper names for plants. This too I found disappointing. Why call it
Datura
when you could call it angel's-trumpet or moonflower? I never liked it when accuracy got in the way of romanticism, and the proper names were so often dull.

I suspected I would never make a proper gardener, because the first thought I had when my sister-in-law mentioned the hedge plant
Sarcococca
was:
There has got to be a better name for that
.

Despite its unfortunate name,
Sarcococca
became a favorite of mine (it is also, happily, called sweet box). It was one of those precious plants to the Northwest gardener: the rare few that bloom in winter, a small and select club. Seattle winters are so long and gray, anything to lift the spirits feels like unexpected grace.

One day a few years earlier, my sister-in-law and I had been taking a walk with the girls when I stopped in my tracks. “What is that
smell
?”

It was my first winter in Seattle. I was back from San Francisco, trying to see if I could hack the dark and rainy season, trying to see what there was for me in this unexpected city, trying to decide if I should take it seriously. I wasn't sure.

I was startled to see how much had changed in the few months I had been away. The leafy green I had come to love that
summer was gone, the skies were low and overcast, the niecelets had sprouted in my absence. The baby, who had been crawling only three months before, was now toddling on unsteady legs, trying to keep up with her sister.

As I stood with my sister-in-law, watching my young niece bobble unevenly down the sidewalk, I smelled a scent entirely new to me.

“What is that?” I asked her. “Do you smell it? It's lovely.”

She looked back to where I had stopped, and a smile appeared on her face.

“Winter-blooming
Daphne
,” she said. “It's one of my favorites, but so expensive.” She pointed to tiny pinkish flowers on a low shrub I hadn't noticed. The leaves were green but edged ever so slightly with white, and the whole thing looked unremarkable. I never would have chosen it for a garden—
but, oh, the smell
. It was like citrus blooms and jasmine and tuberoses all tumbled together. Heavenly.

We stood together there for a moment, breathing in as we watched the girls walk away from us with increasingly sturdy strides, and I felt it in my chest—the exquisitely painful passage of time, how it can be both beautiful and gutting.

I wanted to call them back, to reverse the clock, to somehow make up for the few months I had been away. Their progress left me amazed, both exhilarated and helpless at the days that had slipped through my hands. I wanted to tell them,
Don't grow up so soon
.

Instead I breathed the flower scent deeply and tried to fix the moment in my memory: the day the girls walked into their own world.

It wasn't until that first winter in my mother's garden that I noticed it, hidden amid the careful planting of the formal front yard. There, between the Japanese pines and maples and ornamental quince, was the largest winter-blooming
Daphne
I had
ever seen. As if it had been selected and placed there especially for us.

All through the bleakness of my mother's first winter in Seattle, all through February, March, and April, I clipped tiny sprigs of
Daphne
to bring home with me. Set in water on a sunny windowsill, they opened and perfumed my house: this unremarkable flower with the intoxicating scent. Unexpected sweetness in the midst of gray days.