Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow (19 page)

To see my mother with the baby was even more affecting. When my brother was born, she had been overwhelmed, newly abandoned by her husband, suddenly responsible for the care and support of a family of three. There had been no time to enjoy her baby. She was focused on survival.

Now, thirty-odd years later, my mother no longer had to work so hard. And here was a child who looked exactly like the child she had missed out on. She poured herself into the baby, marveling at his development, his intelligence.

“Do you know what Graham did today?” Her conversation opener on the days he had come to play was always the same.

“Why don't you tell me?”

“I was making lunch, and he wanted his quesadilla, but they weren't done, so I told him we needed to be
patient
. Then, later in the afternoon, when we hung the birdseed balls in the yard, I looked for birds and finally said I guessed they weren't coming. Do you know what he said then?”

“I don't know.”

“He looked at me and said, ‘Grandma,
patient.
' Can you believe that? That's pretty abstract thinking. I tell you, that kid is just
so smart
!”

My mother was smitten. Like I had never seen her before.

When I went upstairs to get a cup of tea, or saw the two of them together in the garden, a wave of emotion washed over me. My mother with her gray hair, a little boy who looked exactly like my brother. They walked hand in hand, looked at each other with such adoration; they spent hours playing with blocks or studying some small rock or pinecone in the garden. She had all the time in the world for him, and he loved her for it.

Sometimes, if you're really lucky, life gives you a second chance
.

Once the children had gone home, however, it felt as if all sunshine had gone out of a bleak sky. The house was big and cold, and my mother and I were left there, just the two of us with our sharp edges, puzzle pieces that never seemed to fit together.

We fought that winter—and not just about toilet paper. On the worst days, we fought about deeper things: how judgmental she was, how I feared I disappointed her, how we each failed to meet the other's needs. John may have used Chinese medicine to explain our dynamic, but that didn't make it any easier to live with.

“Loving you is like trying to hug a porcupine!” I shouted at her in the midst of a particularly bad fight. “Do you realize that?”

My mother stopped and laughed, a short, angry bark. Then she paused.

“Yes,” she said slowly. “I imagine it is.”

The next day I could barely remember what had set us off. It almost didn't matter. The subtext to our arguments was always the same.

Why don't you see me for who I am? Why can't you accept and love me the way I need to be loved? Why are you making this so hard?

It was late at night that October when I got the email from my friend Sarah:
Are you still awake? Can we talk on the phone? I have something to tell you
.

Sarah and I had seen each other a week or two before, on a walk through the wooded trails of Carkeek Park. She had told me how busy her schedule was, how she didn't have time for the medical appointment she had made. “Why don't you postpone it until after your deadline?” I asked. She had a book project taking up too much of her time.

I had plenty of friends in Seattle by then, but none with
whom I shared as many commonalities. Sarah understood my fierce Northern California politics; she had lived there herself in high school. We were both trained journalists, with the cynical second-guessing that brings along with it. She also shared the gallows humor and worst-case-scenario thinking I had been raised with. I had assumed this a feature of my mother's personality but was coming to realize it was cultural. Sarah's ancestors had seen the same hard times mine had.

It was this worst-case thinking that made her ignore my suggestion to reschedule a medical screening for which she was ten years too young on a week she was on deadline and had no free time. It's good she didn't listen to me—for there she was on the phone, telling me she had been diagnosed with cancer.

There would be surgery, she said, and then they would see. They had caught it early. Had she waited ten years for the screening, as medical guidelines recommended, she would have died. If she survived, it would be entirely due to modern medicine and her own fiercely suspicious nature.

I sat there on the phone that night wondering if my mother was right—perhaps we
should
expect the worst, perhaps we should plan on it. Life increasingly felt a fragile and dangerous proposition. We were all dangling by the thinnest of threads. How easy to start spinning out of control, how easy to plummet into the chaos. Really, it could happen anytime.

I spent the night after Halloween at Sarah's house, having dinner with her husband, Daniel, and the kids. She was in the hospital and had asked if I would help out. Her little girl—the baby we had all passed around that hot summer night—was a toddler now, and the evening routine was hard to do alone.

That night one of the boys refused to eat vegetables but still wanted candy afterward. When I said no, he started crying—big tears that turned his face red. Daniel was putting the baby to bed, and I pulled the crying child onto my lap. He resisted at first, then went limp, snuggling his head under my chin and sobbing
as if his world had broken in two. When he wrapped his arms around my waist, it took all I had not to cry along with him. I knew exactly how he felt.

His mother's in the hospital; give him the damn candy already
.

When chemo started I began going over for dinner on Wednesdays, when Daniel worked late, bringing with me a big pot of soup. When you cannot make things better, when there is nothing you can do to make a problem go away, it's therapeutic to chop vegetables. It makes you feel like you are accomplishing something.

Each week as I chopped the vegetables—kale from the garden, mustard greens, chard—I thought about all I hoped for my friend. I hoped the soup might make her strong. I hoped it might bring her some comfort. I wanted her to have something easy to heat up on days when she was busy or not feeling well. It was only soup, but it was all I had.

When the soup was ready I took the still-warm pot off the stove. I doled some out for my mother, then carried the rest to my car. I put the pot on a kitchen towel on the floor of the passenger seat and drove to Sarah's. She and Daniel lived only ten minutes away from my mother's house, the soup still warm when I carried it into her kitchen, dodging small, excited children. “Tea's here!” they shouted.
“Tea's here!”

When we sat down to dinner—the two boys, the toddler, Sarah, and I—the family went around the table, everyone sharing two good things about their day and one bad thing. The bad things were predictable—a broken toy, a lost book, perceived unkindness on the part of a sibling, all the small but significant heartbreaks of childhood. The good things ranged from a favorite dessert to a new game, or a visit from a friend. But on the nights I was there, each of the boys said that one of their best things was that I had come for dinner.

After the toddler was asleep, after I had read the latest chapter of
How to Train Your Dragon
with the boys, after we had
cleaned up the leftovers and had a cup of tea and a chat at the table, the alarm for Sarah to take her medication would ring, and it was time for me to go. She always thanked me, over and over again. Over and over again, I said it was nothing, it was my pleasure, and really it was.

What I don't think she knew, what I don't think she ever understood, was that she was helping me through my long, hard winter as well. Those evenings with her and the kids felt warm; they felt joyful, even in the midst of fear and uncertainty.

To walk through the door and have small people cheer just because I had shown up (
Yay!
It's
you
!) was an antidote to my mother's grimness, her frustration with me, and my own feelings of failure at work and at life. At Sarah's I felt appreciated in a way I rarely did at home. I could make her daughter laugh just by hiding behind a doll blanket. I marveled at the boys' latest Popsicle-stick creations, and they glowed bright with pride. With my own family, I felt guarded, always fearful of judgment or rejection. Being at Sarah's felt validating. It felt redeeming.

Sometimes a kitchen-table chat with a friend is exactly what you need to soothe the barbs of the day. We all have our small but significant heartbreaks. We all need help in hard times. But sometimes help works in mysterious ways. I might have been helping my friend, but she was helping me just as much.

That is the mark of a good friendship, I thought, driving home late at night on quiet, dark streets. When you each give all you have and you both think you are getting the better deal; when walking through the door of a house that is not your own feels like coming home.

And week by week, soup by soup, we got through the long, hard winter together.

F
OR AVID GARDENERS THE
season starts early, in January or so, even in the Northwest. It may be cold and wet outside; it may be muddy and dark before 4
P.M
., but January is the month the seed catalogs start arriving in the mail. January is the month gardeners begin to dream.

It might sound outrageous to compare the pages of garden catalogs to pornography, but really, it's just a different kind of lust. Hidden in those shiny centerfolds is a perfection that also calls with a siren song. To a gardener, pictures of juicy tomatoes, beguiling flowers, frilly lettuces, and fruit trees hung thick with cherries tempt and tantalize. This perfection may be equally unattainable—but don't mention that in January or February. That time of year anything is still possible.

That winter my mother suggested we take a seed-starting class. I said yes because I knew she wanted to go. After an evening spent learning about vermiculite planting mixes and grow
lights, she came home and set up a sprouting station next to a south-facing window. There she hung lights that would give the seeds more hours of illumination than our short winter days could provide. She spread out a heating pad from the nursery to keep the soil warm and filled containers with the special mix used for starting seeds.

Some gardeners, I was beginning to realize, do not go to the plant sale in May and buy their entire garden, pre-sprouted and already three inches tall. Some gardeners grow their own.

There were many reasons for this, as I was learning from the gardening books I read those long winter nights. Cost is the most obvious, but seed diversity was also important. A hundred years ago there were 497 varieties of lettuce available from commercial seed companies in America; now there were only thirty-six. We'd gone from 285 cucumber varieties to a mere sixteen.

Each lost variety led us down an increasingly precarious path, reducing the resilience of our food supply. The greater selection of plants that were grown, the better chance there was of surviving a crop failure. Had the Irish not been so dependent on a single potato variety in the 1800s, the blight that caused the Great Potato Famine would not have been so devastating, and the course of human history would have been different.

The U.S. government had, at one time, understood this. Starting in 1839, seeds were collected, propagated, and distributed by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office—they were considered essential for the growth and security of the nation. By the end of the 1800s, the government was distributing more than a billion seed packets each year.

Commercial seed companies didn't like this. It was hard to make a profit on a product that could be obtained easily, traded, and saved from year to year. It took forty years of lobbying, but in 1924 an association of commercial seed companies convinced Congress to shut down the government distribution program.

The seed breeding being done by commercial seed companies
wasn't a new pursuit—its roots go back to the dawn of agriculture. For generations, this is how our species survived. At the end of each growing season, the biggest beans, the sweetest tomatoes, were set aside. They were not for the dinner table but to start next year's garden or crop. But it wasn't until the 1900s that seeds became big business.

The first step toward profit was hybrids: crosses of plants developed for certain beneficial characteristics. Hybrids do not grow true—if you saved the seed and planted it again, you wouldn't get the same product. At the end of the season, farmers who grew hybrids had to buy more, improving the bottom line for agricultural companies but making farmers dependent on an outside source of seed. If you wanted to grow Early Girl tomatoes, you had to pony up each spring for seed.

The next step took place in 1980. Until that point, a single plant could be privately owned, but the genetic code that made up the plant belonged to all. The Supreme Court's ruling in Diamond v. Chakrabarty changed that—a scientist who developed a new plant or life-form could now apply for a patent and own the rights to it. The same government that once distributed seeds for free was now issuing patents on nature. The staff of life—once considered so vital to our survival—had been privatized.

Seed companies were quickly bought up by chemical and pharmaceutical corporations. A single corporation, Monsanto, between 1996 and 2013, acquired seventy-nine different seed companies. Bayer bought up thirty-two, Dow Chemical twenty-four. While some independents remained, there are farmers who would tell you it's hard to keep the big agricultural businesses out of your fields or garden. The small, seemingly homespun company you may be buying your seeds from could be owned by one of the giants.

It wasn't just seed profits these companies were interested in. Chemical companies developed seed strains that were resistant
to their pesticide products. A farmer could now plant a field of corn and spray the whole thing with weed killer. Because the corn had been bred to resist that particular chemical combination, the weeds would die, and the corn would continue to grow. Seeds were a way to get farmers to purchase more chemicals, which led to problems with pesticide runoff into rivers and streams and tainted land.

For this reason and for others, there were those who said seed saving was a political act. Hybrid seeds could not be saved from one year to the next, but others could—and had been for centuries. They were called open-pollinated seeds. Some open-pollinated seeds were heirloom varieties, stretching back generations; others were more modern, but in each case you could save and share the seed. I started looking carefully at the seed packets I bought, choosing companies I knew to be independent and committed to preserving seed diversity. To grow them, it seemed, was to save them.

That winter my mother started her seeds, laying the sprouting mix out in a long tray of small, square compartments, tucking away in each of them a tiny seed capable of turning into a plant, a flower, a zucchini vine. A week or two later, when the seed had sent out a shoot that broke the soil and grew upward, reaching for the light, it felt miraculous. This is how we have survived as a species; this is how we have reproduced and grown strong: this simple but deeply wondrous ability to produce our own food.

As my mother was tending her seeds, spring was slowly coming to Seattle and to the garden. I was used to it now—the gradual way that spring comes in the Northwest. I had missed the subtlety at first. I had been expecting spring the way it comes in California: early and insistent. I hadn't noticed the music had already begun to play.

It started with snowdrops blooming tiny and white. I had noticed little clumps of these scattered around the garden the
year before and brought them all together in a border at the base of the kitchen stairs. Now snowdrops were one of the earliest signs of a change in season. Their small white flowers felt like hope.

Next came the crocuses, sticking their thin necks up from the earth, and daffodils, which grew tall before revealing hidden gold. There was forsythia as well, delicate sprays of small, cheerful yellow flowers. I had planted a forsythia that Knox had given me in a spot where my mother would be able to see it from her desk. It hadn't bloomed yet, but there was always hope that this year it would. Gardening is the kingdom of second chances.

Once my mother's seeds were on their way, she turned her attention to the next thing on her list. My mother wanted to get chickens.

We were not new to the world of chicken raising. We'd had them in the country, when my brother and I were young. We had chickens again in my teen years, when the man my mother bought our house from had a flock and didn't want to take them with him. Did my mother want chickens along with her four-bedroom, two-bathroom home set on a leafy quarter acre at the base of Mount Tamalpais? Of course she did: fresh eggs for her children.

Her children, who thought sleeping in on weekends a universal right of all teenagers, were not impressed when we had to wake up early to let the chickens out. When it came time to clean their coop, we were less impressed still.

Now, in Seattle, my mother wanted to do it again, but I was dubious about what I had dubbed Project Chicken. For all the same and different reasons.

“Who is going to open and close the chicken coop when you're gone all summer?” I asked. “You know it gets light at 5
A.M
. in the summer. You can't expect me to drive up here every day just to let chickens out.”

I had finally moved out of Orchard House that spring and
back to my hilly neighborhood, into the building where I had kept my name on the waiting list. The view wasn't as stunning as in my magic carpet ride, but there was more room—a full bedroom, French doors, hardwood floors, and five closets that were all mine. After the long winter at my mother's house, after living out of boxes, I was happy to be there. Happy to feel like I was returning to my own life. Chickens had no part in that.

“Well,” she said, “I'll just have to figure something out.”

A few weeks later my mother told me the neighbor girl would be opening up and closing the chicken coop. The neighbors had their own flock, and once she took care of them, she would come next door and do my mother's chickens. My mother would pay her five dollars a week. She was eleven years old, and this would be her first job.

When my mom wants to get something done, she gets it done. This time she wanted chickens.

On an early spring afternoon, I met my family at Seattle's Portage Bay Grange so the kids could pick out their chickens. I was a few minutes late, and as I parked my car, the girls came running. They had both gotten haircuts—my sister-in-law finally giving in to pleas for shorter hair and bangs. For a moment I didn't recognize them. Who were these tall girls with bobbed hair swinging as they bounded toward me? Surely they could not be
our
kids. How were they growing up so fast?

When Graham toddled after them, I picked him up and held him close for a moment. This one still smelled like a baby, but even that would soon pass. It was all going by so quickly.

The kids got their chickens that day—tiny little fluff balls. My mother wanted Ameraucanas, an American-bred version of the Araucana known for their blue-green eggs. This meant our fluff balls were not the charming yellow chicks of Easter. Our fluff balls were a somewhat unappealing shade of brown.

“Can we hold them? Can we hold them?” The kids jostled
to be able to see the chicks in the small, folded brown box they had been placed in.

“No, sweetie. Not yet,” my mother explained. “They're too upset from all the commotion. I'm going to take them home. You can come over tomorrow and hold them. We don't want to put them in shock.”

At this point the toddler started crying. He just wanted to hold his fluff ball.

That weekend we gathered at Orchard House, on a rare sunny spring day. The chicks were living in a large cardboard box filled with wood shavings in the kitchen. There was a lamp set up next to them with a red lightbulb that was kept on day and night. It looked like they were getting light therapy for jaundice, as newborns sometimes do. The chicks were fine—they just had no mother to keep them warm. The light would do that job for them.

The kids pushed toward the box, each wanting to be the first to hold his or her chick.

“No,” my mother said firmly. “We must all be calm and gentle. We don't want to upset them. They don't know you yet—and you're really big and scary compared to a little chick.”

She had the kids sit cross-legged and, one by one, slowly picked up the tiny balls of fluff and placed each one in a child's small outstretched hands.

The looks on their faces when they got their chicks said it all—wonder, pride, excitement, the mystery of holding new life, tender and warm. That look was my first hint that I might have been wrong about Project Chicken.

The kids selected names for their chickens—they had picked them out before they got to the house that day. They had decided on their own, without any adult input.

That is how we ended up with chickens named Pancake, Cookie, and Raisin.

The chicks were keeping my mother busy with ministering to their needs in the kitchen. One of the chicks developed a blockage of the cloacal vent—where the eggs (and everything else) come out. This is known colloquially in poultry circles as pasty butt.

It is easy to remedy with a Q-tip and warm water, but I steered clear. It was another piece of Project Chicken I wanted no part of.

The chicks were clueless about manners, my mother said. Water dishes and feed dishes were things to be walked through. “They really are a mess,” she reported, aflutter and distracted in a way that made it seem as if she was actually enjoying it all. It reminded me of the day, a few years prior, when she told me she was thinking about getting a dog.

“But you don't like dogs.”

“I don't
dislike
them,” she said, “and studies show people with pets live longer.”

I'd read those studies too. I wondered if the longevity was a result of added companionship, or if having a pet gave you something outside of yourself to take care of—an occupation and feeling of usefulness that might otherwise decline with advancing age. When my mother suddenly had to hang up the phone, to get back to the chickens, I thought about this some more.

The chickens, it seemed, were going to be my mother's dog.

While my mother was busy tending chickens, I was busy in the yard. I had decided to plant an asparagus patch, like the one my mother had when we were kids.

The asparagus in my mother's garden emerged from the ground in spring, thin stalks pointed upward. Once they got tall enough, you could pluck them at the bottoms of their stems, these odd-looking vegetables. We've all seen bunches of asparagus in the store, bound together by rubber bands, but to see
them emerging singly from damp soil is to be reminded of something primeval. They look spooky, ancient.