Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow (6 page)

She dashed around the corner and opened the linen closet door, grabbing a mesh bag and turning it upside down, dumping the contents onto the stream of water.

What came out of the bag was my childhood: a cascade of pieces of cloth, each bringing back memories. There was my brother's old pillowcase with chunky trains printed on it, a faded tea towel that had hung in our kitchen in the country, a bit of yellow-flowered sheet I had stained as a child, a favorite red scarf, the remnant of a work dress my mother used to wear.

This was my mother's ragbag—I hadn't known such a thing existed. It was another reminder that she came from a time and a set of circumstances in which resources were valued. Even old T-shirts were not thrown away. I felt a flicker of guilt at the clothes I had consigned to the garbage can. Anything wearable went to charity shops, but stained T-shirts and ripped pajama pants I threw away. What else was I supposed to do with them?

Here my mother was, squirreling them away to use when needed. Not for the first time, I wondered if a large part of our problems in the modern age stems from the fact that we've been given so much we no longer see the value in a thing; we no longer know its worth.

In a hardware store a few weeks later, I saw a bag of “T-shirt rags.” They were scraps of new cotton fabric marketed as the perfect thing to clean or wipe up mess.

The two-pound bag cost $16.50.

My mother's ragbag came from the same era, the same mentality, as having an orchard. You can't eat the yield of an orchard by yourself—even a single fruit tree can produce too much for some families. Backyard fruit trees come from an era of home food
preservation, of putting up the harvest, of canning and freezing and making applesauce. These days we buy the fruit we need for our lunches and the occasional fruit salad or pie. Most of us are not prepared for a harvest.

I was in a good position to deal with such abundance. I might not have had a ragbag, but I knew how to can and make jam. I had learned the basics long ago, from a babysitter who lived with us for several years. Lorraine had taken the gushy plums that fell on the ground—the sticky ones about to ferment—and made jam with them. Plum jam, from our trees: It tasted like summer.

Later, in high school, I taught myself to make canned treats as holiday gifts, nestling jars of chocolate sauce and jalapeño pepper jelly in decorative baskets. It must have been odd to receive such a housewife-like gift from a teenager, but I had been cooking for the family for years. The kitchen was more my domain than my mother's.

Then I forgot about canning for a decade or so. College and starting a career left no room for putting up the harvest. Life was busy and full. I scarcely noticed it was harvest until Halloween pumpkins started showing up. My city apartment did not come with a plum tree in the backyard.

Then, while living in San Francisco, I started canning again. The urge came from the same place as the urge to grow herbs—a desire for something tangible, rooted, made by my own hand. I remember the first batch of Meyer lemon marmalade, the afternoon spent over a pot of simmering fruit and sugar waiting for it to firm up enough to jell. It took time, a slow, can't-rush-the-clock sort of time. It took standing in the kitchen and smelling the citrus and stirring and some lazy daydreaming as well, but by the end I had twelve jars of jam, lined up and gleaming golden in the light.

That night I went to a literary event at a local bar. As I looked around the crowd of people in designer glasses and hip clothing I had an odd thought:
None of you made food today
. I felt
proud and productive in a way I hadn't in a long time. Like winter might come and the winds might howl, but I had made jam for my people, and whatever happened we would be all right.

I knew each of these trees in my mother's orchard would provide for many. It might just be jam, or applesauce, or canned pears, but the winter could come, and even if the power went out and the roads were snowed under, I would have food for my people. We would be all right.

One by one, the trees were all planted, though my mother and I rarely agreed on a location. Don was forced to re-dig more than a few holes, until one day my mother called on the phone.

“Can you come up here? Don refuses to dig any more tree holes until you make sure it's in the right place.” I was still trying to envision the big picture, to see what the orchard would grow into.

When I truly stepped back and tried to see the big picture, however, it didn't always make sense. I may have yearned for a harvest, but my mother was in her seventies. By all rights she should have been slowing down, having a smaller and simpler life. Instead she was taking on a huge garden project, living alone in a house larger than any she had lived in before. I understood her urge to give the girls a garden, but surely a small and manageable yard filled with flowers and vegetables would do the same job. Did we really need an orchard? I confessed these concerns to my permaculture teacher.

“Your mom is in the legacy phase of her life,” Jenny said. And maybe she was right.

Maybe this whole garden was about what we leave behind, how we are remembered. My mother would not live to see the fruit trees we were planting come to full maturity. She would not see the leafy canopy they would eventually develop; she would never see these small cherry saplings covered in fruit.
And still, she planted them. It reminded me of a Martin Luther quote I'd once heard: “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”

My mother knew all this too. The final tree we planted was a persimmon, an unusual choice for a backyard fruit tree, perhaps, but we both love them from our time spent in Asia. There persimmons are common, shiny, green-leafed trees hung with bright orange fruit like small lanterns. In the fall the fruit is dried to make a popular snack. It is not uncommon to walk through the streets in Japan and Korea and see strings of orange persimmons hung from upstairs windows, drying in the autumn sun.

There were always a few old persimmon trees that went unharvested—deep in the countryside where farmhouses had sometimes been abandoned. I loved to see them after the season's first snow. The dark branches threw a stark relief against the white, and the brilliant orange fruit floated among them, often with a tiny cap of snow.

We planted our persimmon at the top of the side yard, in a spot that had held a dead cherry tree. It seemed right to put it there. I knew that when the fruit grew, we would pick it long before the first snow of winter fell in Seattle, but still, it made me feel happy and nostalgic for Japan.

Persimmon trees take years to bear. Unlike the cherry and plum and peach we planted, which had a good chance of producing small crops within a few years, the persimmon would take at least five years before it flowered or fruited, maybe seven.

“Well,” my mom said when we had patted the last shovelful of soil around the base of the small sapling and stood back looking at the twiggy tree. “
I
may never get to taste any of these persimmons—but you better enjoy them for me.”

I put my arm around her, surprised as always by how small she was becoming—fragile, in need of protection.

“I will, Mom,” I said, drawing her close. “I promise.”

W
HEN
I
WAS BORN
, my mother thought I had Down syndrome. I was beautiful, she said, but she worried there was something wrong with me. She asked the nurses; she asked the doctors. Finally a specialist came and sat down with her. He said he understood her concern, but the baby was fine. I didn't have Down syndrome.

“
Why
would she
tell
you that?” my friend Lianne asked when I told her this story.

I shrugged. “I don't know. I've never thought about it.”

The story was part of my history—I knew it the way I knew that my parents first met at a party, introduced by a mutual acquaintance, drawn together because they had both lived in Asia, and that had I been a boy they would have named me Adam. I never questioned these things.

My friend was outraged. “Every baby deserves to be seen by their parents as perfect,” she said. “Your mother looked at you
and saw something wrong—
something that wasn't even there
—and she
told
you about it?”

My mother often told me things that would be better left unsaid; she had a blunt and uncensored tongue. In this case, however, I knew things were more complicated.

When my mother was born, her own mother nearly died. There was hemorrhaging, blood loss. The complications that would kill my grandmother three years later, in childbirth with her second daughter, had made themselves known. The doctor pulled the baby out and rushed to save the mother. My mother's birth was not a celebration, it was a close call. Nobody was rejoicing and declaring her perfect. Perfection is something we have little experience of in my family. My mother had no role model for joy.

I once asked her why she thought I had Down syndrome. Newborn babies are often funny looking—wrinkled little guppies or wise old men, they sometimes look alien or amphibious. But for the most part, no matter their oddness, their parents find them beautiful.

“You were a C-section,” my mother told me. “Your head was perfectly round—even the nurses commented on it. But there was an almond slant to your eyes. Nobody else noticed it, but it made me think you might have Down syndrome.”

My mother is a worrier, prone to concerns large and small, perennially convinced the worst will happen. Her assumption didn't surprise me. People talk of those who see the glass as half-empty or half-full, but I've long known for my mother it is neither.

For her the glass is cracked, the water has seeped out and dripped off the table, now the floorboards are warping. Eventually the house will fall down.

This is the way things have always been. No amount of hope, happiness, or optimism on my part has ever made a difference.

Bringing back a long-neglected patch of earth is no easy feat. On the days I came to Orchard House, I never knew where to start. The scale of all that needed to be done was overwhelming; it was tempting to just stand there and gawk. My urge was always to run away, or to take a nap. In the face of the insurmountable, my instinct is to not even try.

My mother is built of sterner stuff. Because she expects the worst, perhaps, she jumps in swinging. Every time I came to the garden, she was in the back, knee-deep in weeds, hacking at blackberries. Each week she asked me to roll around the large yard-waste bin so it could be put out on the street for garbage day pickup. “It's hard for me to do it by myself,” she said apologetically the first time.

“That's because it weighs more than you do,” I said, struggling to pull the tall container forward. “How did you get so much packed in here?”

“I filled it up and climbed in to stomp it all down,” she said. “Then I added more.”

When my mother wasn't pulling weeds, she was focused on removing rocks from what she planned to be her vegetable garden. When we had seen the garden the summer before, the beds had been overgrown with tall wild grasses, an occasional straggly dahlia peeking through: flowers left by the man who had gardened here long ago.

The selling agent had sent us pictures of the house from the seventies or eighties, when the garden had been a well-tended thing. The grass, now pockmarked with dandelions, had been mowed to a velvet nap, perfectly straight lines running the length of the yard, like in a baseball field. There had been tall trees, maples and cedars that towered over the back, making the yard shadier, more northwestern. Only the stump of the maple remained.
There had been entire flower beds of dahlias. The few bulbs we dug up here and there were the survivors.

“I just don't know why there are so many rocks,” my mother said, kneeling in the flower bed. The stones were midsized and rounded, like those from a riverbed. “I wonder if he put them here on purpose. Maybe to break up the soil, or improve drainage.”

By “he,” she meant the Korean man who had, from what we knew, tended this garden. He had lived here with his companion, the Japanese gentleman, now quite old, from whom my mother had bought the house. Lee and Kaito were becoming characters in our imagination. Lee had been married before and had children. It was his son who had been in charge of selling the house when Kaito could no longer live on his own.

This story amazed me. It would have been unusual to have that sort of intercultural relationship in the seventies and eighties, but to be living together, raising children? This sleepy off-the-beaten-path neighborhood held more complexity than it might have seemed to at first glance. Perhaps all families do.

I wondered about these men. Had the two-room cottage been built for the children? Was the Japanese garden out front a gift from Lee to Kaito? Had it reminded him of home? Suddenly the Asian pear trees made more sense, and the ornamental maples. The weeping cherry tree, now dead, must have been a nostalgic sight each spring.

There were deeper mysteries in the story as well. It was said that Lee killed himself, maybe by hanging. We didn't know the details. Apparently even this lovely garden, even the banks of dahlias and towering maples and the perfectly straight mower lines on the velvet lawn, had not been enough. Maybe a garden cannot overcome the ways in which we are broken. Perhaps flowers and vegetables and hopeful things poking out of the soil cannot heal all wounds.

I was hoping that wasn't true. I was betting on it.

The first person outside my family to see the garden was my friend Knox. In the few years I had known him, Knox had taken a bare plot of land behind his house and turned it into an enchanting spot. You entered by a gate in a picket fence and felt as though you had been transported, perhaps to the south of France. There were flowering borders, a tidy vegetable plot, artichokes galore, apples and quince in the fall. On my computer I kept a picture of the mounds of bare soil it had started out as, a reminder of what is possible with vision and hard work.

I had barely brought the car to a stop in the driveway before Knox jumped out and started poking around the front yard, its sculpted evergreens and large, carefully placed boulders.

“It was obviously laid out as a Japanese garden,” he said. “But then there's that viburnum and dogwood. What are they doing there? Maybe they were added later.”

“That's not what I want to show you,” I said, shutting my car door and beckoning him around the side of the house.

I took Knox past the weedy side garden, through the
NO TRESPASSING
gate, and into the back. “
This
is what I wanted you to see.” I gestured to the long, wild yard sloping down the hill.

I expected Knox to be ecstatic. He is an enthusiastic person, a devoted gardener. I thought he would be as giddy as I was.
Look at all that is possible
.

He wasn't excited. He was silent.

He started wandering around, still not speaking, an expression on his face I couldn't read.

Knox wandered a full ten minutes without a word. He looked into the greenhouse. He looked at the fruit trees. Eventually he made his way back to where I was standing.

“So,” he said gravely. “What is your plan?”

“There's no plan—are we supposed to have a plan?”

“Yes, you need a plan.” He looked over at the garden. “You
really
need a plan.”

The garden was huge, Knox said. Gigantic. I might have thought this wonderful, full of promise and potential, but Knox was more practical. Or perhaps just more experienced. He knew what we were getting into.

“The only way I see this working is if you divide the garden,” he explained. “If you put a picket fence across the middle, then you can have an upper garden that is tended and tidy and let the field go wild. But you need something to mark it.”

I knew my mother would never agree to a fence. My mother liked the long sweep of the property; she liked the wild.

“It's great, but it's a lot of work.” Knox looked at the garden again, then turned and looked at me. “You know my garden killed my freelance career.”

Knox had spent three years getting his garden in shape—three years of neglecting work in favor of weeding and pruning. That glorious patch of flowers and herbs that felt like the south of France had come at a cost.

I had a freelance career too, and already I was feeling the pinch. I wanted to be in the garden; it was just hard to find the time. I worked long hours, often on deadline. When I had my community garden plot, there had been periods when my attention was required elsewhere and the weeds started to rise. That's the way life was.

But now I had someone to remind me I was falling behind. I had my mother on the other end of the telephone.

“When are you going to come up here and work in the garden?” she called to query. “I need your help tying up the wisteria, and what are you going to do about the side yard?”

I looked doubtfully at my schedule. I didn't have time for it. My work rarely fit in a forty-hour week. But it was hard to say no to my mother.

“I
think
I can come this afternoon.”

“
What time
this afternoon?” My mother did not mess around.

“I'm going to aim for three.” I never knew when I would be able to get away. Three often turned into four or four-thirty, sometimes five. I was always later than I said I would be. By the time I got to the garden, my mother was annoyed.

“You're late,” she said by way of a greeting.

“I'm sorry—I just couldn't get away.”

It was true too. I would rather have been gardening than working. I had been looking forward to coming—up until the very moment I got there and ran full force into the weight of my mother's disapproval. Then I wanted to be somewhere else. Anywhere else.

This was not a new feeling for me. I often liked the idea of my mother more than the reality. The reality never seemed that happy to see me. The reality pointed out all my flaws.

“We'd better get to it,” she said. “There isn't time to do much before it gets dark.”

When I try to explain my mother, I have to start in the past. My brother and I were young, we lived in the country, we had babysitters who lived with us and did the cooking and cleaning and school pickup. Our babysitters were young too. We had a few good ones over the years, but most were pretty flaky. Our babysitters had boyfriends who were always stoned. Sometimes our babysitters were stoned as well.

My mother would come home late at night, tired after a long day of teaching or clients, and look around for what wasn't working. With the final bit of energy she had, she fixed problems. Sometimes she yelled in frustration or anger. There was no time to enjoy what might be going right.

Even today, my mother scans for problems. If something is done there is no acknowledgment, thanks, or praise; done means one less thing to worry about. It's the problems that draw her.
Maybe she just needs to be useful. If something is going right, it's no longer her concern. My mother's spent her life in triage, as if on a battlefield.

It's efficient, but it's a hard way to live. It's almost impossible to live with.

The truth is, there wasn't much going right for my mother back in those early days. Her husband had left, she had no financial or emotional support, no family nearby to be of help. She was working hard to keep her head above water. Maybe life felt like a battlefield. Except she had these children, climbing trees, and making up games and songs, and growing like weeds. I wonder if she allowed herself to enjoy that. To enjoy us.

Perhaps the story starts earlier than that. In Florida, where my grandfather moved with my mother and her newborn sister after their mother had died. The family had wanted to take the children away, to have them raised by one of my grandfather's many siblings. He probably should have let them.

My grandfather quickly remarried to keep the family intact, proposing within months of his first wife's death, but the woman he chose was cruel. When my mother came home from school, her stepmother made her sit on a stool in the yard. She was not allowed to play or come into the house—not even to use the bathroom. She sat on a stool alone, clenching her thighs together to keep from wetting herself. She'd have gotten in even more trouble for that.

When she was ten, my mother tried to run away. She set off out the front gate, and at the end of the block she turned right. At the end of that block, she turned right again. She wasn't allowed to cross the street, so she soon found herself back at her own gate. She couldn't run away because she wouldn't disobey.

She left home at seventeen, bound for New York. “If you ran away at sixteen,” she told me, “the cops would come after you. But if you ran away at seventeen, your family had to pay the
police to track you down. I knew nobody was going to pay money to get me back.”

I could probably go back further still. Back to ancestors who fled from oppression, who hid from armies, who survived on their wits. Perhaps my mother expects the worst because her people so often experienced it. My brother and I are the first generation to know privilege, to have opportunities and advantages. It seems ungrateful to complain.