Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow (17 page)

I resolved to do better. I staked my tomatoes to wooden poles and old branches we had lying around the garden. I followed the example of my mother's ragbag and ripped up a pair of beloved pajamas that had finally sprouted holes, and I used the strips of fabric to tie the tomato stems to the poles. Every time I saw the blue checked fabric fluttering in the breeze, I thought of the friend who had given the pajamas to me and smiled. It was much better than throwing them in the trash.

Then, I kept watch. When I saw the leaves of a new branch forming in the crook of a stem, I pinched it off and threw the acrid, sticky leaves away. I was vigilant. I took this pruning thing seriously.

The problem with pruning is that it requires hardening the heart. It's difficult to cut back an otherwise healthy plant. It was easy to pinch off the new tomato leaves, but what if I missed the new branch for a week or two? What if it was fully formed?
What if it had flower buds on it?
Left alone, those buds would become tomatoes. For a gardener who spends her time trying to make things grow, it's hard to also be the executioner.

I was no stranger to this dilemma. I had been dealing with it for years.

When my mother lived in California and I still lived in San Francisco, she called me every January or February. “The wisteria needs to be pruned. Can you come do it?” She had planted the climbing vine when we first moved into the house. Over the years it had wrapped itself around a support column for the upstairs deck and woven in and out of the railing. On its own it would have taken over the place. Every spring, it needed to be cut back.

I don't know why my mother thought I was more capable of doing this than she. Perhaps, after years of doling out tough love
to her children—having to be mother and father, good cop and bad—she was sick of it. She didn't want to be a hard-ass. Not even to her plants.

Most every year I spent an afternoon tangled up in wisteria. I took out deadwood; I clipped thin or unhealthy shoots. I pulled out the wayward vines growing between slats of the deck and inching under the shingles of the house. Over time they could do serious damage.

Every year, as I did this, I thought about my own life. If pruning allowed a plant to focus its energy by getting rid of its excess, what in my life needed to be pruned? Was I spreading myself too thin, going off in all directions, trying to do too much? The answer was usually some version of yes.

Maybe there were friendships that no longer fit, clubs or activities that didn't hold my heart the way they once had. I was coming to realize that trying to do everything meant not doing anything terribly well. It was time to make choices. What in my life had become deadwood? As painful as it sometimes might be, perhaps a quick snip was better. Sometimes you have to cut things back in order to grow.

Standing in the side garden that summer, I had the same thoughts: Where did I need to focus; what was I ready to let go of? So much had changed with the move to Seattle. I no longer rushed about. I took walks now, long baths, and I woke with the sun. I hadn't been unhappy in San Francisco—busy had been fun, it had made me feel important—but I was developing a life now that suited me better.

And yet, there were gaps. I had a growing community in Seattle. I was finding my people, making the sort of friends who understood who I was without explanation, the sort of friends who showed up when you needed them.

The outer ring of my life was becoming well populated, but the innermost circle was a question mark. Leaving San Francisco had let me step back and look at my life. I had been too busy to
really pay attention. It had been all go-go-go all the time, and I hadn't bothered to check where the boat was heading. When you are reasonably happy and well occupied, you don't look at the big picture. You don't ask if this is the shape of the life you really want.

When it came to that, I didn't have a vision. I had grown up trying to be there for other people, trying to be what I thought they wanted from me. I knew what I wanted from my career, but I hadn't thought about what I wanted for myself. I was too busy trying to keep my world afloat.

What freedom I had found had come from leaving—from moving away from everything I knew. Living on the other side of the world, I'd no longer had to try to hold my family together; I hadn't been trying to make anyone else happy. It had felt like such a relief.

I hadn't been trying to build anything either. What life I constructed on the other side of the world would eventually be torn down. It was never meant to last. I couldn't imagine anything lasting.

I was used to pieces that didn't fit together—the constant hustle to shore up the cracks before everything washed away. I had no confidence I could build a successful family of my own. My mother hadn't been able to, and she was stronger than me. I knew I could fall in love and be loved in return—I had proof of that. But I never believed those I loved would stay.

The one man I should have been able to trust had left. My father had attached wooden blocks to the pedals of my tricycle so my small feet could reach, then he walked away and never came back. There had been no one to teach me to ride.

A relationship, a home, a family of my own—did I want these things? I'd spent so many years saying I didn't, I no longer knew if it was true. And here I was, spending my time and energy tending my mother's garden. I was not growing my own.

Life had taught me it's easier to pretend you don't want what you think you cannot have. It's safer that way.

With dutiful pruning the tomato plants grew tall and were laden with ripe fruit: red, yellow, and orange. When the arborist my mom hired came by one September day to look at our fruit trees, she told me there were more ripe tomatoes in my garden than in any garden she had seen in Seattle that summer. I felt like I had won a prize.

When my mother came back from Canada at the end of the summer, the staked plants were heavy with fruit, and the cherry tomatoes—Billy's included—had grown up the side of the house, reaching nearly six feet tall. Every day we harvested baskets of them, tangy and sweet, bursting with seeds.

It was hard to know what to do with so many cherry tomatoes. I started roasting them. The baking sheets went into the oven filled with cut fruit that emerged soft and oozing, flesh and skins collapsed, flavor made bolder by the low heat of the oven. We couldn't stop eating them.

The tomatoes rarely made it into anything I cooked. Mostly we ate them with our hands, standing in the kitchen, exclaiming how good they were. And when the tomatoes were gone, we ran our fingers along the battered baking sheet to sop up the oily residue, rich with tomato flavor, not wanting to waste a single drop. That sucking fingers thing my mother sometimes does—this time I was standing alongside her, doing it myself.

And in those moments, my mother and I were together. We were eating cherry tomatoes from the garden. We were smiling at each other, trying to outmaneuver the other for a particularly luscious bit of syrupy juice, grinning like crazy conspirators.

W
HEN
I
FIRST MOVED
to San Francisco, I lived in the upper flat of a large rambling house with three roommates, one of whom was moody. Whatever the cause of her discontent, I always knew the exact shade of her bleakness as soon she opened the door.

“It's pretty amazing,” she'd say. “You know when I'm in a bad mood before I even get in the house.”

I smiled; I shrugged. The truth is she didn't take pains to hide it. She was a social worker. After a long day of listening to other people, I think she just wanted to vent.

The other part of the truth is that I am the oldest child of a single mother. We are a special breed.

I have only vague memories of the yelling that happened when my mom came home at night, exhausted and worn out, and had to face everything that had gone wrong over the course of our day. Mostly I know she yelled because she's told me that she did. And because I remember when I got old enough to yell
back. But I remember her coming home angry and at her wit's end. I remember trying to make it better.

Oldest children of single mothers develop a special sort of sensitivity to what is happening around them, a skill honed by trying to make things work when they so clearly do not. It's a version of the same skills women have developed throughout history. When you are not in a position of power over your own destiny, when the quality and shape of your days are dependent on the favor of others, you become sensitive; you become savvy. You learn to soothe and coddle, influence and meddle, all under the radar. Call it female intuition, call it outright manipulation, call it womanly wiles if you like. I call it survival.

My childhood gave me the skills to read emotions, to suss out power dynamics and unspoken dangers. It has allowed me to live in countries where I do not speak the language—it's not the words that are important; listen for what isn't being said. As with a sixth sense, sometimes I just knew.

I always knew when my mother wanted to talk to me. Not the quick conversations about where I left the pruning shears or when I was going to move the table in the garage (the one with
my
stuff on it). I knew when her panic began to kick in. My mother functioned on the basis of fear. There was no middle ground. If too much time went by and she hadn't heard from me, I was probably dead.

I didn't always call her when I got that feeling. Sometimes I was busy; sometimes I didn't want to cater to her fear or be ruled by it. Sometimes I didn't want to talk, or I just plain forgot. And sometimes I thought that—if she really so desperately needed to check that I was still breathing—she could damn well call me herself.

But I always got that feeling, a prickle on the back of my neck. I knew when my mother needed me.

I got it the summer I was staying in her house, in late July, when the corn was up to my waist in the side garden and wispy
threads of golden-green corn silk had emerged. The whole thing amazed me and made me want to stop people on the street to tell them, “Did you know
I grew corn
? It's true!”

That July I ignored the feeling about my mother. I had a friend in town for a few days, and we were busy exploring the city. By the time we got home at night, it was too late to call. In the mornings we headed out early, trying to make the most of our time. And if my mother really wanted to talk to me, she could call me herself. At least that's what I told myself.

I called a few days later, once my friend had gone home, and got the answering machine. I left a rambling message and hung up. It often took a few tries for us to connect in the summer. I called a day or two later, and my mother answered the phone.

“How are you doing?” I asked.

“I'll tell you in a sec,” she said. “Let's talk about you first.” My mother rarely wanted to talk about herself. She always, however, wanted to talk about me.

I told her my news—my friend's visit, the fifteen-mile hike we had gone on, the state of the garden, the state of my corn: all the mundane details no one else would be interested in. I thought nothing of the conversation. My radar was silent.

Finally I turned the tables: “So, how are you doing? What have you been up to?”

“I've injured myself,” my mother said slowly, carefully. “I've broken my back.”

Suddenly the world got very quiet. “
You've what?
Tell me what happened!”

She had walked out of the cabin first thing in the morning, dew still on the deck. While going down the four small steps that led to the ground, she slipped, feet flying out from underneath her, and landed on her tailbone. She bounced down the wooden stairs,
clunk, clunk, clunk
. Somewhere between step one and step four and somewhere between vertebrae T5 and T8, my mother had broken her back.

The pain had knocked the wind out of her, and she'd lain gasping on the ground. “I still don't really know what happened,” she told me.

Because the cabin sits on its own few acres, because no one would hear if she shouted, and it could be a week or more before anyone came by, my mother did the only thing she could do. Once she caught her breath, she crawled up the stairs on her hands and knees and into the cabin. She somehow made it to the telephone.

She was taken off the island and to the nearest hospital that afternoon in an ambulance, a journey that involved two ferryboats. She spent the night there, but there was little they could do for a series of fractured vertebrae. Eventually they sent her home. Each detail she shared felt like a knife.

“Why didn't you call me?”

My fear gave me an edge like anger, though mostly I was angry with myself. How could I have ignored that feeling? How could I have known my mother needed me and not responded?

“I thought about it,” she said, her voice unusually small and calm. “But it's not like there was anything you could do.”

“If
I
were hospitalized in a foreign country,
wouldn't you want to know
?”

“Of course,” she said. “But that's different. I'm the mom.”

In that moment, it didn't feel different to me. It didn't feel different at all.

Though I lobbied for her to return to Seattle, my mother decided to stay in Canada. “In Seattle I'd only have you—and maybe your brother, but he's really too busy. I have more community here,” she told me.

My mother had never been good at making friends. In Seattle she had barely tried. But on the island there were people she'd known for years and a stronger community ethic. People
were looking in on her, she promised me. They had been bringing her food.

It felt like a million small pains to be so far away when all I wanted to do was feed her soup and watch over her, but I knew I wouldn't change my mother's mind. I've almost never been successful at that. And in another few weeks I would be there, with the niecelets, a visit that had already been planned.

“Really, I'm just lying down until then anyway,” she promised.

It took all I had not to jump in the car and start driving north. If I left immediately, I could make the cabin by nighttime or first thing in the morning.

“I promise, all I'm doing is resting and reading books,” she said. “I'll be
fine
.”

She didn't tell me until later about the weeklong therapy workshop she conducted, despite her broken back, for students who had come from all over the world to study with her.

“I didn't want to disappoint them,” she said meekly when I got angry. “I spent most of the time lying down. But, yeah, that was a really dumb idea.”

Because of that, what had been predicted to be a ten-week recovery would take longer; it would be more painful.

It didn't matter that she was the mom. I should have jumped in the car. I should have known she needed me. I should have listened when she called out.

The island where my family used to live lies between the long and narrow landmass of Vancouver Island and the Canadian mainland, one of dozens of islands scattered in the Strait of Georgia. They rise wooded and rocky out of calm, clear waters, the coastal range towering above to the east. I did not know it as a child, but after years of travel, I can now say it is one of the most beautiful places on earth.

What I knew as a child was that it was fun. It was fun to run barefoot down to the beach and build entire villages out of driftwood and pinecones. It was fun to jump in the lake for afternoon swims and to straddle the logs that sometimes floated on the water. It was fun to pick berries and to see the horses, sheep, and goats that dotted the island. It was fun to collect bottles of milk delivered to a small wooden box nailed to a tree just off the road.

My memories don't go all the way back to when my mother and father put me, only five weeks old, into the car and drove from California to Canada to live on this small island. We didn't know then that it wouldn't work out. But while they were there, they made friends—friends who had two boys a little older than me and would go on to have another two. Years later, my brother and I spent summers with them, all six of us kids running wild. These are among my favorite memories from childhood.

But memory is fickle. Memory twists and changes and grows larger than the thing it started out as. In my memory we spent every summer on the island, though I know that not to be true. Somehow those golden days when all six of us ran barefoot and blond-headed became magnified and pushed out more mundane recollections. In my mind the summers stretched endlessly, and we jumped off rocks into the lake as if we were immortal, as if we could fly.

Those summers were the only extended time my brother and I spent in a family with two parents. There were routines and boundaries and meals served at the same time every day and enough grown-ups to worry about the grown-up things. I still had to look after my brother—and he didn't always make it easy—but I could be more of a kid than I usually was. It felt like freedom. It felt like flying.

I hadn't understood the pull this place had on me until I had been away from the island for several years in my twenties.
When I returned, after a five-year absence, I rode my bike to our friends' house to spend the day with them. As I cycled out of evergreen woods and saw their fields unfold in front of me, the orchards and gardens of their small farm with the house lying low and views across calm waters to the mountains beyond, I was surprised by the feeling that welled up in me, unexpectedly strong and vehement.

This is home
.

Miles away from my own house and mother, this was the one place in all of my childhood where I felt secure. Sometimes home has nothing to do with family or even with love; sometimes home is simply the place where you feel safe.

I wanted my nieces to know the island the way I had, to jump into the lake and build things on the beach and run through the woods as if they were wild. They were growing up with security and safety I could not have dreamed of as a child—two parents, generous financial means, and a whole cast of characters in their extended family. But I wanted to give them the island. Maybe it would be to them what it had been to me: a wondrous and golden place.

My mother wanted the girls to know the island as well. The year before, she had flown the three of us up on the floatplane that lands on the island once a day, a trip more expensive than flying from Seattle to New York. We had stayed only a few days, but we walked the rocky beach and collected shells, and the girls swam in the lake and picked berries. It had been just a taste, a preview. This year the plan was a full week.

“Are you sure you still want the girls to come, with your back?” I was feeling protective of my mother, not at all sure she was up to the energy of small children.

“I couldn't do it alone,” she answered, “but if you're there, it will be fine.”

I might have been worried about my mother, but my friends were worried about me planning to take small children on a car
trip that can run ten to twelve hours. There were three ferries and one international border crossing involved. In the summer, there were often long lines.

“I don't even think I'd volunteer to do that with my
own
kids,” Sarah said when I explained the journey to her.

“You're taking two kids on a ten-hour road trip without an iPad?” another friend asked. “Go buy one immediately!”

But I remembered long drives with my brother when we were young. Our own childhood visits to the island had started in California and took three days. I didn't want to plug the girls into a device; I didn't want to lose the time with them. I told my friends we'd be fine.

I was more concerned about leaving the garden. I had asked my brother to water while I was gone. I felt bad for burdening him, but if I was looking after his children, he could at least check on my tomatoes.

I used to take care of my mother's leafy yard in California, when I was still living in San Francisco and she was gone all summer. Every year she wanted to go over what needed to be watered, and when, and how. “While you water in the front, put a drip hose on the ferns by the side of the house,” she used to tell me. “Not a full stream, just a dribble.”

“I know, Mom. It was the same last year and the year before.” It was the same every year, but each June she insisted on telling me again, as if she didn't trust me to remember.

I now knew that trust was not the largest factor when you're leaving your garden. You might trust the person who will be filling in for you, but they don't know the plants the way you do; they don't have a relationship with them.

Would my brother notice if the pumpkin vine I had nursed back to health started to wilt again? Would he think to pluck the budding heads off the basil plants so they'd continue to produce leaves? And what about blossom-end rot on the tomatoes? Would he know what to do about that? A garden is a complicated and
nuanced thing. It's not just watering—I had a relationship with the garden that my brother would never be able to approximate.