Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow (14 page)

I opened the door, preparing for cold, but felt only a mild breeze. As I walked across the patio barefoot, I saw it wasn't frost at all.

A heavy blanket of dew had condensed and now hung from every blade of grass and sprig of flower or vegetable. From a distance it looked like a frosty haze, but when I got close, each drop glittered in the early-morning sunshine. Each drop reflected the world back to me, as if they were a million tiny mirrors. Each drop revealed beauty.

How lucky I am to see this. If I hadn't stayed, I would never have known. The magic would have happened without me
.

When my mother returned, I told her I would stay there for the summer. Two weeks later, when the apartment building where I had put my name on the waiting list called to say there was a unit available, I told them no thanks. I would be spending my summer in the garden. It needed me.

And maybe I needed it too.

I hadn't moved often. Not the way most Americans do—with rental trucks and packing blankets and furniture wheeled out on a dolly. I left for college with exactly two duffel bags and a box sent after me. I moved to Japan with three suitcases and several crates of books. And when I moved into San Francisco, from my mother's house across the bridge, I did it gradually, taking little bits here and there in my car. I felt an odd pride that nothing I owned was too big to fit in the back of my station wagon. Besides one very heavy black desk, nothing was too big for me to carry. I could do it all on my own.

I even tried to move the desk by myself once, too impatient to wait for help. That is how I hurt my back, an injury that continued to aggravate me years later with occasional flare-ups. Sometimes it incapacitated me. This usually happened when I
picked up something heavy or unwieldy without waiting for help. Some of us are slow learners, or maybe just stubborn. Some of us think we can do everything on our own.

My first Seattle move, however, to the charming studio sublet, had been a different experience. In Seattle, it seemed, you didn't do things alone.

“Your homework is to let people help you move,” my friend Mary told me, as I started to plan and pack.

“What do you mean?”

“You have such a hard time asking for help—this is the perfect opportunity.”

“I don't think I can do that,” I told her. I didn't mention a friend had once nicknamed me Lone Wolf.

Then Mary sat me down and told me a story.

When she and her girlfriend moved into the house they now share, they decided it was time to hire movers. They weren't in their twenties anymore—it was no longer okay to ask friends for help in exchange for pizza and beer. It was time to be grown-up. So they threw money at the problem and hired out the labor. The move went smoothly, and all was fine until Mary's best friend found out what they had done. Then he got mad.

“Why?” I asked. Wouldn't most people prefer
not
to hoist boxes and lift furniture on a sunny Saturday? No one wants to spend a weekend that way.

“He said I hadn't given him the chance to help—I had taken away the opportunity for us to become closer.”

I thought about this. In San Francisco I had never been asked to help anyone move, but in Seattle I already had been. When friends moved out of the city to a nearby island, I had packed my car full of their artwork and breakables and driven it onto the ferry and to their new house at the other end. Then I helped unload the truck until my back got so inflamed I had to lie on the floor in their new yellow living room. My friend and her baby lay next to me, and we laughed at how crazy the whole
moving process is. When someone walked in carrying a box of angst-filled journals from my friend's younger years, we joked that the warning label should not read “heavy”; it should be
weighty
.

Helping
had
made me feel closer to my friends. I liked feeling that I was a small part of this new adventure in their lives, as if I was part of their family of friends. Years from now we would still share those memories of dusty packing boxes and exhaustion, the small yet rich details of life as we live it.

“Oh, yes,” my friend Sarah said when the subject came up on one of our walks. “Moving is how you know who your friends are.” And then she volunteered to help me move.

I was still not convinced—the whole idea made me feel uncomfortable. What if I asked and no one came? What if they came and saw the contents of my messy drawers and ran away? What if they thought worse of me? It seemed easier to keep it all at arm's length, to do it myself, to pay people if needed. Asking for help made you vulnerable.

I probably would have tried to pack and move the contents of a three-story house by myself, but I wasn't given the choice. That old back injury returned to haunt me. An awkward twist with a packing box and suddenly I was in pain. I couldn't lift heavy things, and I certainly couldn't carry them up three flights of stairs. I needed my friends. I needed their help.

There was an uncomfortable email sent to those who had offered:
So, about that moving thing…I might need your help after all
. To my surprise, people actually showed up.

Jennifer and Carrie packed my kitchen, taking far more care wrapping dishes than I ever would have. Kairu brought boxes and packed up my children's-book collection. Marianne drove those boxes across town in her minivan, Anne mopped my living room floor, Sarah helped carry furniture, and in the midst of the frenzy, Viv volunteered to scrub out my refrigerator.

“You sure you want to do that? It's pretty gross.”

“Oh, yes,”
she said far more enthusiastically than I expected.

It made me squirm to have someone scrub the congealed smears and spills from inside my now-empty refrigerator, but I let her. I simply could not afford to turn down help. I gave it a cursory wipe down, then tried to be okay with someone else seeing the grossest bits of my life. It felt like being naked in public.

Halfway through the process, intent on her work, Viv called out for me.

“Do you have any Q-tips? I want to get the cracks really clean.”

By the time she was finished, the fridge was cleaner than when it had come off the manufacturing floor, and Viv was beaming. “Isn't that better?” she said. “You can call me any time you want your fridge cleaned.”

I sent her home with handfuls of fresh herbs and grateful thank-yous, baffled that this dreaded chore seemed to be something my friend truly enjoyed. “It lets me practice my OCD,” she said with a laugh. “I find it very satisfying.”

Somehow, despite my injured back, my friends helped me out of the house and into the little apartment in the sky—and not a moment too soon. I carried up the last box at 9
A.M
., after a night of no sleep, got into the car without showering, and drove to California to attend a summit that started that evening. I never would have made it on my own.

It would be three weeks before I returned to Seattle, but when I did it was to an apartment of carefully wrapped glasses and plates. Every box I opened, every lumpy bundle of crumpled newspaper and bubble wrap, felt like a present from my friends.

I do not know if I have ever felt so loved by so many people.

When it came time to move out of the sublet, however, I didn't feel I could ask friends. I had learned my lesson
—help is good
—but it seemed like anyone dumb enough to move more than once in a calendar year forfeited the right to assistance. This time I would be carrying things down the stairs, not up, and many of my things were already in storage; how hard could it be?

I somehow didn't calculate that I would have to
walk back up
three flights after each load. Multiply that by thirty or forty, and the stairs became their own circle of hell. I didn't anticipate that I would get sick, and that packing and hoisting and carrying are much harder with a fever and body-rattling cough. I never imagined I would cling to the banister, pulling myself up hand over hand. I never imagined it would be as bad as it was.

I cursed every box of books I owned. I cursed the twelve pasta bowls I hadn't put in storage the first time
—who needs twelve pasta bowls in a studio apartment?
I cursed the winter coats and snow boots and the box of damned Christmas tree ornaments. I considered throwing them all from the top of the stairs, just to see the angels take flight, the glass balls shatter, tinsel and glitter strewn everywhere.

Mary was right. We should not do these things alone, if only to preserve our own sanity. It is sometimes as thin and fragile as a glass Christmas tree ball.

My mother had offered to help, but I had turned her down. We were not a help-out family. All my life I had watched her do everything alone, and I had picked up the message hidden in her actions: to ask for help is somehow shameful; it means you can't do it on your own.

It's not that I never asked my mother for help. I just tried to do things myself first. It was only when it became clear that I couldn't, when I began to get panicky and desperate, that I called my mom. To ask her for help meant I had failed, that I wasn't as strong or as capable as she was.

I was never as strong or capable as she was.

I knew she would come, but she was the court of last appeals: I would be helped, but I would be judged. My mother was there for me, but she was never a soft place to land.

And anyway, she was packing herself, to go to Canada. I didn't want to ask when I knew she had work of her own to do.

It never even occurred to me to ask my brother. This seemed like another part of family he liked to keep at a distance. And anyway, he was busy helping his wife and children.

When I called my mother that day, coughing and exhausted and near desperate, she came. She interrupted her own packing to help with mine. When she saw my apartment filled with boxes in various states from full to empty, she sighed. “Why must you always be so disorganized?” she said, and then she got to work. We carried things down the stairs and filled up her car. I was weak on my legs, light-headed as I shoved things into the nooks and crannies of her trunk.

“I'm done,” she said, standing by the side of her now full car. She meant she was done with helping; she was done with me.

“Can I just run up and get the plants?”

The woman I had sublet the apartment from had left her plants, even though, when she asked, I'd said I didn't want them. They were big, spiky things that took up room, but after nearly a year of keeping them alive, I had a hard time tossing them in a dumpster. My mom had agreed to take a few. Others I had put in the building lobby with a note, and they had eventually disappeared. Adopted, I hoped, by other residents.

My mom slammed the car door in irritation. “I'm getting too old for this shit.” Then she looked at me and sighed. “Go get the plants.”

I turned and quickly went back into the apartment building, stomping up the stairs.
Why
couldn't she be a supportive mother?
Why
hadn't she shown up a week ago with boxes and packing tape?
Why
didn't she want to sit on my floor and wrap candle
holders and gossip and go out afterward for pizza? I had helped pack up her garage
—why didn't she come help me?
Why did I have to ask?
Why
did she have to judge? Why wasn't she just
there
?
Why couldn't she be the mom?

I ran out of stairs before I ran out of complaints.

When I came back down, clutching a pot filled with a spiky thing for which I had no name, my mother had three words for me.

“Call your brother.”

“Do you think he'd come?”

“Of course he would,” she said. “He's your brother.”

I didn't say anything. I turned away and waved her off and quickly went into the building. There I sat down on the steps and I cried. I wept at the idea my brother might show up. That he might be there for me.

And then he did. That night, after his children were in bed, my brother came and carried boxes with me—all the boxes that were going in storage. He carried boxes and he teased me. (“No one who has been out of college as long as you should still have a futon.”) And he acted as if it were the most normal thing in the world, though to me it felt astounding.

“I
told
you he would come,” my mother said when she called later that night to check on me. The apartment was nearly empty; I was washing windows and floors, scrubbing the bathtub, tossing the last few bits of trash into bags and boxes, running on fumes and adrenaline.

When I was desperate and at the end of my rope, my family had shown up for me. I had asked, and they had come. It was the most mundane thing in the world, but for a family with little glue to bind them, it felt like a small miracle.

That first week in the garden, I barely got out of bed. I felt beat-up, so sore from the move and the endless stairs. I was still
wracked by coughs, the deep, body-shaking ones that bring up phlegm and mucus, the ones that make you feel like it might actually be possible to cough up a lung or your own spleen.

My mother was gone to Canada for the summer, and I slept most of that week. Not a fitful sleep; I slept like the dead. I stayed upstairs in the coffin room, because it was next to the bathroom, and who cares about a view when you're not awake?

When I finally staggered out of bed, I was hungry.

It was more than hunger. I wanted something warm, something soothing that would make me feel better—something I could wrap my hands around to feel comfort. It is hard to comfort yourself when you feel miserable. Comfort requires something from the outside.

There was nothing in the fridge. My mother had cleared out her perishables before she left, and the only things I had brought from my apartment were condiments. I stood at the open fridge door, looking in despondently. Then I noticed the container of green Thai curry paste.