Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow (7 page)

But what a cross to bear—to expect the worst, to wait for the sky to fall. All my life I had been told it wasn't
if
the world would go to hell, just when. Tomorrow? Next week? It's best to be prepared.

I didn't want to live like that. I wanted grace.

And yet, I owed my existence to the fears that had made my ancestors suspicious. Those who were not scared became complacent. Those who trusted often died. Only the crafty and cynical made it out alive. Who am I to say where the line should be drawn?

The weedy dahlia bank my mother had cleared of rocks was going to be planted with vegetables. There were three planting beds, about ten feet long and five feet wide. Not that either of us had measured them. Preparation may be a family trait; precision is not.

“What are you going to plant?” I asked my mother as she raked in soil amendments: fertilizer, compost, coffee grounds.

“Kale.” I knew her one-word answer wasn't meant to be brusque, even though it sounded that way.

“I was thinking of planting raspberries against that back fence. Is that okay?” The fence lay behind the vegetable beds and marked the property line. “It will get nice sun almost all day long.”

I planned to take cuttings from those first raspberries I brought from San Francisco, the small and sweet ones. I imagined
them grown tall, full of ruby-colored fruit each June. I liked how this bit of California was following me, that the berries my nieces and I had been picking for three years now would be planted here too. We were settlers, bringing the saplings and seeds from our old home to the new one, even if this new home did not require a sea voyage or months in a covered wagon.

“Sure.” My mother looked up briefly from her work. She had abandoned the rake for a moment to cut back a tree branch that was leaning over the vegetable bed, blocking the path. We didn't know if the tree in question was viable—it looked like a cherry but had no blossoms that spring. Despite our shared cynical nature, we were holding out hope.

My mother took the heavy loppers and reached over her head to grasp the branch between twin blades. Standing below, she had little leverage, yet she kept trying to bear down with enough force to sever it. Trying and failing.

“Here, let me do that for you.” I was taller, stronger, just standing there. Why hadn't she asked for help?

“I can do it,” she said gruffly, scissoring the handles again, trying to make the dull blades cut through the branch. Still, nothing.

I put my hand on the loppers. “Really, Mom—I can do it.” I stood over her, holding the handle, not letting go.

Finally she released her grip and stepped back. From where I stood on the slight embankment, the branch was level with my shoulder. Bracing one handle against my waist, I pulled the other toward me with both hands and took the branch off with one try.

Not for the first time, I wondered: Did she think we kids didn't know how to do things, or was she just unused to having any help at all?

In the early days of my childhood, my mother went to see a psychic. Or perhaps it was an astrologer or someone who read
auras. It's hard to say. The stories I've heard from the days before I can remember have a fantastical feel to them. As if the cloud of incense and marijuana smoke hanging over Northern California in the early seventies resulted in a state of magic realism: Things don't always make sense.

In the story I am with my mother, no more than two years old. My brother had not yet been born. Perhaps it was before my father left—when my mother was pregnant and worried about the stability of her marriage. Or maybe it was afterward, when she was panicked and looking for answers. I don't know.

What I know is what she has told me: that there were books and toys in the corner of the office and I went to play with them.

The woman gestured to the back of my small blond head.

“You know the two of you have been together in many lifetimes,” she said.

“Really?” My mother was surprised.

“Oh, yes,” the woman continued. “You've spent many incarnations together. Sometimes you were her mother—and sometimes she was yours.”

My mother says I was playing in the corner, not paying attention, but the moment the woman said that, I nodded my head. I didn't turn around, I didn't say anything. I just nodded. As if I had known all along.

I don't know what to make of this story. It seems part of that magic realism of my early childhood: reincarnation and enlightenment and free sex and the Summer of Love. That I had been my mother's mother? That we had been linked together for lifetime after lifetime? I'm not sure I believe any of it.

What I do know is this—perhaps the only thing I need to know.

It
feels
true.

What I call magic realism other people called freedom. They called it
following your bliss
. The early seventies were a ferment of it, particularly in Northern California.

In the case of my father, bliss took the form of a dark-haired woman who had come to the coast looking for her own freedom. It was said she'd left a husband and children behind. Perhaps, like my father, she hadn't wanted the responsibility of family.

My mother, already pregnant with my brother, had taken me to New York. When we flew back, my father met us at the airport and we set off on the long drive down the rocky coast to Big Sur, where we lived. I was two years old. My mother says I sang the entire way home.

When we reached our small house, the three of us walked in. The house stood behind the lawn where my parents had been married just a few years before, my father wearing his favorite leather boots, my mother with flowers in her hair. The smooth grass sloped toward the sea. My rope swing hung from the eucalyptus tree nearby; my little red tricycle stood in the driveway. My father had attached wooden blocks to the pedals because my legs weren't yet long enough to reach.

Inside the house there were wine bottles everywhere, the remnants of two weeks of partying and sex. While we had been gone, my father had taken this woman into our home and made it their love nest. A few minutes later my father walked out alone. Our family was finished. In the ways that really matter, my childhood was over.

We had to move, quickly. Our small cottage was on the grounds of the retreat center where my father was on staff, the housing tied to his job. But he had decided not to be a father; we couldn't live there any longer.

One day soon after, my mother drove up to San Francisco to look for a house for us. As we drove back down the winding
coastal highway after a long day of searching, she gripped the steering wheel, white-knuckled with fear for our future and the baby she carried. Trying to keep it together. Trying to keep it in.

I was in a booster seat next to her, just two years old. I don't remember that day, but I've heard the story. As we drove the tortuous coast highway, twisting our way between a rocky cliff face on one side and a sheer drop to the ocean below on the other, my mother says I looked at her.

“Cry, Mommy,” I told her.
“Just cry.”

My mother has never subscribed to graceful gardens of flowers; she wanted to grow food. Vegetables. Lots of them.

“I'm going to grow kale all winter long,” she said in delight when she first saw Orchard House's run-down greenhouse. “It's going to be my green gold.”

That spring, however, she was focused on lettuces: tiny shoots of green and red. My favorite was Flashy Trout Back—a speckled variety—which I loved for the name alone. There were other greens as well: mizuna, pak choi, arugula. It was all about the greens.

My interests lay in food as well, but not in the same way. I wanted flavor. I wanted an abundance of it. I wanted to make grand and generous meals. I wanted to have a garden to cook from.

I had started cooking young, learning from our babysitter Lorraine, who took the squishy plums that fell on the ground and made them into jam. She turned cabbage and cucumbers into pickles. I found it fascinating.

Soon I was reading cookbooks, experimenting with recipes. We moved away from the country when I was eleven. My new school was close enough to ride my bike there, and my mother
now had her office in the downstairs of our house, so we no longer needed babysitters. That's when I started cooking for real. My mother worked late, and I liked the feeling of making dinner, of providing for our family in this small way. When I went to sleep at night, I often left a plate of food in the kitchen for her to eat when she was done.

Soon I was giving her shopping lists of things I needed for dinner. Sometimes she gave me money and dropped me off at the grocery store. Once I could drive, I went on my own.

My mother was supportive of my cooking experimentation, but she didn't understand it. For her, food had always been about health and nutrition. It never occurred to her that making dinner could be fun, that sitting down to a meal was pleasurable.

“I don't get cooking,” she said. “You put all this effort into making something—and ten minutes later,
poof
, it's gone!”

But food is about pleasure, coming together, sitting down, relaxing; it's about enjoyment and nurturing yourself and others. I'm not surprised my mother does not understand this. None of these words are part of her active vocabulary.

Over the years, however, I learned to cook for her, to tempt her palate. I learned she likes sour and bitter flavors: kalamata olives, radicchio, lemon. I learned to devise dishes that made her smile—just the ghost of a smile, around the corners of her mouth. It might not have been indulgence or community or relaxation, but it was a start.

I learned her palate so well that sometimes, when she was done eating, she ran her fingers around the rim of her plate to wipe up the leftover drips of sauce or dressing. Part of me wanted to tell her to control herself, to have better manners, but I never did. Instead I watched in horrified fascination as she stuck her fingers in her mouth and sucked the very last bit of flavor, hungrily, greedily. Like a child who had never been given enough.

Ever since I was a little girl, I'd been asking my mother what she liked. If only I knew what would make her happy, I could get it for her.

Do you like bubble bath, Mommy? Do you like earrings?

It was years before I realized the sort of sadness my mother had couldn't be taken away by a new scarf or a piece of jewelry. The sadness my mother had was in her bones; it would never be vanquished, no matter how hard I tried to be happy for both of us. There was nothing I could purchase or do or even cook that would change things. Life had fundamentally let her down, it seemed, and the shade of that disappointment colored everything. There was nothing I could do to fix that.

When Mother's Day came that first spring in the garden, however, I knew exactly what she wanted—and it wasn't a scarf or jewelry or bubble bath. My mother wanted a day in the garden.

It may seem odd that she would want to spend her celebratory day weeding and working, as she had most days since moving to Seattle, but I knew she didn't want to do it alone. She wanted me there. Other mothers and daughters might go to brunch or the spa or go shopping; my mother wanted to work. She wanted to get things done.

“I'll come for Mother's Day,” I said, “but how about I bring lunch?” I couldn't leave it at just work. There had to be some grace in the day.

“That's fine,” my mother allowed.

That morning I assembled my ingredients: bitter radicchio, dark olives that tasted ancient like the sea, peppery radishes, salty sharp cheese. I brought a bottle of olive oil and the season's first asparagus.

Suddenly I was reminded of another Mother's Day, many
years before. Or perhaps it had been my mother's birthday or Valentine's Day. The memories blur together.

On that day my brother and I made breakfast. We must have had help—from a babysitter, perhaps. We had baked a cake the day before and hidden it away: a dense whole wheat thing made from the healthful ingredients in our pantry. I remember we stuck a candle in it—and no small birthday candle either. A red taper off the dining table pierced the middle of our heart-shaped cake and towered over it.

I remember the feeling of anticipation—wanting to see the delight in our mother's eyes, wanting to see her surprise, her happiness. We couldn't sleep: It was like Christmas morning. I was six and my brother was four, and we
could not wait any longer
. Dawn was just beginning to break as we carried the tray in, beaming with a pride far brighter than the huge candle sprouting from the center of our homemade cake.

“Mommy, Mommy—
look what we made you
!”

Our mother looked at us blearily, exhausted, her eyes barely able to focus. She smiled wanly and pulled herself to a seated position as we jumped and danced gaily around her. “Blow out your candle, Mommy. Blow out your candle!”

She blew out the candle and admired our efforts. She let us climb in bed with her, but when we ran to the kitchen and brought back oranges for her to peel, she struggled. She was so tired there was no strength in her hands. She was running on fumes, putting up a brave face. I didn't know it then, but I do now.

If only we had let her sleep!

All we wanted to do was love her, make her happy. All we wanted was to have her delight in us.

She tried; she really did. She just didn't have any more to give us.

By the time I carried out the salads I made for our Mother's Day lunch, the fog had burned off and the day turned sunny. It wasn't warm—not the way I was used to from California, where May is summer and everyone wears skirts and sandals. May in Seattle is still firmly spring, summer a month or so away. But the bulbs were blooming—the tulips and irises I remember from my childhood.

We called them San Geronimo irises—named for the small town where I grew up. They were deep purple with a delicate scent and crepelike petals that quivered in the breeze. We had them in our garden in the country, and they had grown in every garden since then. My mother carefully dug up the rhizomes and took them with her when she moved, as families used to do. If something grew well and provided, you took it with you, your seeds and saplings as valuable as money.