Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow (12 page)

By the time Lucy and I came to the garden for our first visit, the weeds were growing tall. The grass was short—in the height of a Seattle summer, lawns actually stop growing for lack of water—but the dandelions were blooming proudly.

These were not the dandelions I was used to, which bloom in the spring and have abundant edible, jagged leaves. These dandelions had small, matted foliage and thin stems that reached upward, each capped with a bright yellow bloom. They were all over the lawn. The flowers reached my knees. On Lucy they came up to her waist; some were chest high. She got three steps into them and stopped walking.

“Go home?” she said hopefully.

“Not yet, Lucy. We're just going to walk across the grass.”

“Noooooo.”

“Come on—we're going to the cottage. There are games inside there.”

“No.”
Lucy retreated to the patio and sat down on a small bench my mom had bought for the girls.
“Go home.”

That was our first and last visit to the garden.

I went to the garden, of course. After a day spent with Lucy, at the playground, on walks, playing with crayons, and reading books, I went to the garden. I filled up watering cans and did my duty, irrigating strawberries and moving hoses from tree to tree. The watering routine alone took about an hour. Then I would stand there, on the patio, and look down the long and sloping yard at everything that needed to be done.

And then I would flee.

On the evenings I stayed in the garden, it was bittersweet. The garden was huge, there was so much to do, and there was only me. I often heard voices as I weeded or dug, conversation floating over the hedge from the neighbors at the far end of the meadow—they ate outside in the summer; they often entertained. I heard laughter and the clink of wineglasses as I squatted in the dirt, in grasses that were now up to my waist, grubby and lonely and completely overwhelmed.

What was I doing here all by myself? This wasn't how I had imagined it at all.

It didn't seem strange to be spending my days with a toddler. That summer it felt like everyone I knew was pregnant—six friends all due within a month of each other. Most of these were second or third children. As we moved through our thirties, it was what people did.

What was strange to me, after years of nannying as a teenager and college student, was that now Lucy could have been my child. When we went to the playground people assumed she was—but people had been assuming the child I was caring for was mine since high school. “Go with your mama,” a farmers' market vendor had told the first little boy I nannied for. At seventeen, I had been shocked.

Now, in my thirties, it was much odder that Lucy wasn't mine. Karen and I were about the same age. But Karen and her husband, Brian, had been together since they were sixteen. They had bought a house in their twenties, made a home. They had chosen to be a family.

I had chosen travel, adventure, writing. I'd spent more time alone than I had in relationships—and even though some had been passionate and thrilling, even though marriage and family had been discussed and considered, in the end none of them had felt right. My friends had long ago given up asking if I was dating
anyone. They'd long ago given up trying to convince me I should.

One day I was looking through the website of a fellow writer. Amanda lived in Maine and was homeschooling her three children. Their days were filled with crafts and nature and books and the beach. In the winter they cozied up inside, she and her husband and their brood all in one small house.

I admired Amanda's life and felt drawn to it—but not because I wanted it for myself. I never imagined myself mother to a large family. And yet, there was something in Amanda's days of baking bread and walks in the woods and knitting sweaters and drawing and reading with her young ones that filled a hole in me that had long been empty.

Rather than wanting Amanda's life, I think I wanted to be her kid.

The photo that stopped me was of her children—a puppy pile in pajamas, arms and legs a flurry of wrestling and tickling; you could almost hear the laughter. Suddenly I was in tears.

Fun. They were having fun. Family could be
fun
.

It was a truth I had never known. And I wept because my family had not been fun. My family had been struggle and fear and frantic attempts to somehow hold it together. It seemed no small miracle that we all survived.

I remember one day on the deck of our old house in the country when my brother and I invented a game while folding laundry. We each took a corner of a long flat sheet and put a wooden block in the middle, so that it sagged in the center like a hammock. We swung the sheet back and forth like a swing until it picked up enough speed that we could spin it around and it would make a full revolution without the block falling out. We thought this was amazing. We could do this for hours.

I don't know how old we were. Perhaps I was nine and he was seven; maybe we were eight and six. What is striking about the memory is that there were no grown-ups around.

I know this can't be true—we had babysitters who took us to school and cooked and did the grocery shopping. But it is there in all my childhood memories: the feeling of being alone with no one in charge, the weight of responsibility, the fear of messing things up, of making life worse for our mother.

No matter how much fun we were having, no matter how much my little brother laughed, I was the one who had to stop the game. I was the one who had to say, “No. We need to finish folding the laundry.”

When I was a child, people assumed I wanted to have a family. “You're going to make a good mother someday,” grown-ups said when they saw me taking care of my brother or some other child in my charge. As I got older, it became a question: “Do you want to have kids?” As I entered my later thirties, the phrasing changed: “
Don't
you want to have kids?”

When this happened I told the truth. It wasn't the full story but it was enough. It kept people from asking further.

“I feel like I've raised a few already.”

My friend Sarah was one of the pregnant people that year. All spring we walked around Green Lake, her belly growing bigger and bigger. Come June she had her baby, a little girl. I visited shortly after they had returned from the hospital, in the middle of a rare Seattle heat wave. We sat outside on the back patio and ate the cold noodles I had brought while the hot, steamy day drew to a close.

We passed the bundle of baby around the table, her delicate fingers and elfin ears protruding from a blanket as Sarah's older boys brought toys and books to show me and her husband worked the outdoor grill. Nobody wanted to be anywhere near a kitchen on a day like that.

“I need to get to the garden,” I told them, finally breaking my lethargy and handing back the baby.

“Oh, stay a little longer,” Sarah said, nestling her daughter onto her lap. “The boys will be going to bed soon and we can talk.”

“Yes, stay,” said her husband, Daniel. “It's far too hot to garden.”

It
was
far too hot—and because their backyard had a breeze, because the water tinkling through the fountain that Daniel had installed was soothing, because new-baby time moves slow, I stayed. I stayed until it was ten o'clock.

By the time I got to the garden, the endless northern summer evening was finally at its close, a tiny bit of light still gathered at the horizon. I would have done a quick watering and come back the next day, but I was going out of town. Friends were getting married in California, and I would be gone for three days. The seedlings in the greenhouse, the ones I
kept meaning
to plant, wouldn't survive. I needed to get them in the ground.

I had run out of garden bed area but thought I might make one of my own. As an experiment, I took one of the large cardboard boxes left over from sheet mulching—ten feet by five when spread open—and laid it on the grass in a sunny patch of the meadow. Then I built layers on top of it—soil, compost, and a bag of straw and chicken droppings my friends had given me from their backyard coop. I piled it all up until the bed was more than a foot high, a loose version of sheet mulching. I wanted to plant corn and beans and squash in it.

This was a “three sisters” bed—a Native American tradition of companion planting. The beans fix nitrogen in the soil and provide nutrition for the corn, a heavy feeding plant. The corn gives the beans a trellis to climb, and they in turn help secure the tall stalks. The squash produces large, prickly leaves that mulch the soil and discourage raccoons, who might otherwise eat the corn. The plants work together to help each other.

I thought of this as I built up the layers, shovelful after shovelful,
watering down the soil, nestling in the small corn, bean, and squash seedlings. How many people had done this before me, for how many centuries? I felt like part of a chain reaching back generations. Digging, sowing, watering: planting the harvest. Small, vital acts to ensure our survival.

This work required many trips back and forth, from the patio where we kept the watering cans, shovels, and bags of soil, to the new bed I was building in the back field. The exterior lights illuminated the house, but to walk down the hill was to walk into darkness, to depend on the dim glow of the moon and the stars and my own growing familiarity with the land. It was still warm, even toward midnight, and I strode back and forth wearing a tank top and skirt, the dark and humidity a physical thing, a weight I could feel on my skin.

I tossed off my shoes, something I had never before done in the garden, and walked with bare feet on dry grass, feeling the damp beginning to turn into dew. With my soles I could read the land—the curvature of the path where so many had trod. In the dark I felt strong, powerful, a primal feeling of belonging. I was one with the wild grasses and the stars and the gathering breeze.

In that moment, at the end of a hot day, in the dark garden under a dim quarter moon, planting as so many had before me, there was no other place on earth I wanted to be.

A
FTER
K
NOX
,
MY NEXT
friend to come to the garden was Kim. Though we had known each other only a few years, Kim and I had intertwining history. We had attended the same college—years apart—and had both worked in the book industry; we had helped run different literary festivals. It was as if we had been destined to meet all along. It just took me moving to Seattle to seal the deal.

I thought Kim, more than anyone else I knew in Seattle, might be able to understand the potential of the garden, how there was a chance for this to be a magical place. In many ways I was still the young girl who wanted to climb trees and read books and daydream. I had a sense that Kim shared that too. I hoped she could see past the weeds, the cracked patio, the moss growing between the shingles of the cottage roof. I hoped she could see the wonder.

Kim arrived wearing the linen tank top, long shorts, and
leather Top-Siders that made up her summer uniform. I met her in the driveway where I'd been weeding, keeping an eye out for her. I wanted to be there when she first saw the garden.

That spring had seen a variety of people come into the garden, mostly workmen. They walked in from the gate, and the scene spread out in front of them: covered patio to the left, high banks of camellias, azaleas, and rhododendrons, and a wide lawn that began to slope down toward the cottage and the patio that stood before it. They'd all had the same reaction, every last one of them.

“Wow, this is a really big yard,” they said at first glance.

Then their eyes would travel further, and they'd realize the cottage was not the end of the yard. The garden was a figure eight, the upper lawn simply half the equation. When they saw there was a field down there with fruit trees and wild grasses, they stopped in their tracks.

“
Whoa
. This is a
really
big yard.” There was always a note of awe in their voices. Or was it fear?

Kim was not like the workmen. She was not awed by the garden; she was not scared. Kim was the most competent person I knew. She stood on the edge of the patio at the top of the yard and looked down, past the greenhouse and the cottage to the field and fruit trees beyond.

“Well,” she said briskly. “I can see what you've bitten off here.”

We wandered across the lawn, which was turning dry and golden as the summer progressed. I showed her the vegetables, the spot where a semicircular bed of weeds had been cleared to reveal surprise raspberry bushes. As we walked past the cottage, I described the overgrown blackberries. We peered into the greenhouse, which was sprouting tall grasses from its earthen floor.

“This is a lot of work,” Kim said in a businesslike tone. “And your mom is gone all summer?”

“Yep,” I said, looking around. It was always a surprise to see the garden through someone else's eyes. Kim saw weeding, mowing, berry vines that needed to be cut back.

But as we walked up to the house, past the bank of rhododendrons that reached ten feet high, she peered into the shrubbery, quickly realizing the long, oval leaves concealed space behind them, tunnels and holes in which you could hide.

“You know,” she said slowly, “if I were a kid, I would think this was magical. There are so many places to slip off and read a book or make a fort.” She looked around again, her sharp eye sizing it all up. “Your nieces are going to love it here. What amazing memories you will make for them.”

That was exactly what I was hoping for.

Most of the time the garden didn't make sense: this huge space, all this work, no one there in the summer to enjoy it. I went over to water and weed several times a week, often staying until dark. On weekends I tried to put in a full day. But then I went home. The garden grew and bloomed and flowered and fruited, all without anyone there to appreciate it.

“You're doing this all wrong—you realize that?” Knox had told me. “The best part of a garden is after the work is done, kicking back with a drink and enjoying it. You've got all the work and none of the enjoyment!”

He was right. I had never sat in the garden at the end of a day and enjoyed my accomplishments. At the end of the day, I was tired and dirty and went home.

I started cutting flowers, something my mother would not have approved of. She preferred them growing on the stem. But with her gone all summer I helped myself to dahlias and hydrangeas. It seemed only fair that I get to take something home with me to enjoy. Otherwise, what was all this work for?

There was food, of course. I carried home baskets of kale and
chard each weekend. There were peas in the spring, snappy and sweet, and green beans as summer rolled on. There was lettuce and arugula that needed to be used before it got too hot and the plants bolted, putting out flowers and becoming bitter. My grocery bill shrank, but even that was a toss-up. Was it really worth spending all my free time in the garden just to save twenty dollars a week?

“Why don't you just have a little P-Patch, shop at the farmers' market, and have your weekends free?” Sarah asked, when it became clear that the garden was taking over my life. I sometimes wondered the same.

The garden was lovely, of course. In the summer evenings, when the light slanted golden and the dahlias that had been planted all those years ago glowed and the breeze rustled through the feathery cilantro that had gone to seed, I again felt what I had experienced at Picardo, a feeling that can only be described as peace. But then I loaded up my baskets and went home, and the garden continued on without anyone there to appreciate it.

The only time the garden made sense was Wednesdays. That was the day the niecelets came to play.

I'd hear them even before they came running around the side of the house, tearing through the gate into the garden. “Tea-tea! Tea-tea!”

Usually one was trying to outrace the other, to be first to launch herself at me—sometimes into my arms, sometimes just at my knees. At five and six years old, they were still young enough to want to be cuddled, picked up, tossed about.

As Cate came barreling toward me, I reached out and launched her into the air, long, skinny limbs flying in all directions. I caught her and tickled her as she wriggled and shrieked with laughter, the sound of it cascading down the sloping hill.

“My turn next! My turn next!” Abby jumped up and down in anticipation.

Before I put Cate down, I kissed the top of her sun-bleached head and breathed deep the scent of her. She smelled like swimming pools, sunscreen, fresh towels, a childhood so free of cares it brought sudden tears to my eyes.

“You smell just like summer,” I said. She giggled, and I turned to her sister. More shrieks, more laughter, another kiss on the head.

Their first question was always the same: “What are we going to do today?”

I answered with a question of my own: “What do you think is ripe?”

Early in the summer it was raspberries. We waded deep into the canes with plastic containers, picking the small ruby thimbles that crushed between our fingers with too much pressure.

“Your daddy and I picked raspberries like these when we were your age,” I told them, as the sun beat down on our backs.

“Really?” they said, sounding surprised. “He never told us that.”

“Does he tell you about how things were when we were little?”

“Not really.”

The niecelets were full of stories of their mother's family—of great-grandfather John who played the violin, of the great-grandmother everyone called Hellcat, even to her face. Their great-great-grandmother Jocabed had been the youngest of twenty-one children.

Stories of our side of the family didn't seem to exist, unless I told them. I wondered whether this was because my brother was at work all day or whether he didn't want to talk about our early years, in the same way survivors sometimes do not want to revisit their past.

“We lived in a house in the country,” I told the girls as soft red berries plunked in our containers or were poked into mouths.
“We had a small creek that dried up in the summer but became so big with the winter rains that sometimes it flooded. Grandma planted a garden for us, and there were apple trees you could climb and stay up there all afternoon reading a book. If you got hungry, you just picked an apple to eat.”

“That's cool,” said Cate.

“I liked the apple trees because your daddy was too little to climb, so I could go up there and be all by myself.”

Abby giggled. As an oldest child, she knew what it was like to long for solitude.

“I have an idea,” said Cate. “Let's go up in the loft of the cottage and
tell secrets
.” The final words were drawn out as if they were something dramatic.

So we ran off, abandoning our berry containers awhile. We'd come back to them later in the day. We'd come back to them later in the season, when there would be blueberries and blackberries, each in turn. The summer stretched out in front of us, endless and sweet. Now was the time to tell secrets.

As we climbed the wooden ladder in the cottage and curled up under the sloping eaves, I smiled. I had imagined the girls doing this the day my mother and I came to steal berries in the garden, long before the house was hers. I imagined the cottage their clubhouse, a special members-only password and a
KEEP OUT
sign posted on the door. I liked to think of them trading secrets like currency, whispered confidences large and small, forgotten and remembered.

I just hadn't imagined I would be there with them, that I would be invited in. I never imagined we would have our own special club of three.

When Abby was born, I had wondered how I was going to be a good aunt to her, living so far away. My brother was busy with work, and my sister-in-law never got on the phone to talk. How
was I going to know this child, this miraculous thing that had entered our lives?

“Don't worry about it,” my friend Michelle said. “These days kids have email by the time they're eight.” Her own niece and nephew lived on the other side of the country. They emailed regularly, she said.

But eight years was a long way off. What was I going to do until then?

We had all gathered in Seattle for Thanksgiving the first year of Abby's life. I brought her a picture book about the holiday and made sure to inscribe my name on the cover page, so when she was older she would know I had been there. She was only ten months old, not quite walking. My sister-in-law's parents had visited recently and taken pictures using a camera flash, which Abby did not like. Every time I pulled out my camera, she frowned at me. I went home with dozens of photos of this small blond child giving me the stink eye.

By the next Thanksgiving, Cate had been born—four months old with a mohawk that stuck straight up; we called her the cockatiel. Abby was almost two years old, walking and talking. We went to the park and scuffed in the leaves, and when my sister-in-law got sick the weekend after Thanksgiving, I extended my visit to help with the kids.

When opportunity came the following spring to spend some time in Seattle, I took it. I fully intended to return to San Francisco after the summer. By then the girls would have baseline knowledge of who I was. “I don't want to be the semi-stranger who shows up each year for Thanksgiving,” I told my friends.

What I hadn't expected was that I would fall in love with my nieces. I'd spent time with children my whole life; I started babysitting at age eight. I loved all the children I had cared for, but not the way I loved my nieces.

That first summer in Seattle I took care of each of the girls one day a week—Cate on Wednesday, Abby on Friday—while
their mother took the other child to a toddler gym class. I worked on the weekends to make up for the time. It was worth it.

Together we went to the park, to the wading pool. We picked berries, and each Wednesday Cate and I waited for the garbage truck, the highlight of her week. We read books and played puzzles, and Abby and I visited a farm, where she fell in love with a purple cabbage and insisted on holding it in her lap the entire drive home. I came home those days tired but filled up in a way I couldn't quite put words to. It was as if I had been thirsty a long time and not known it.

One day, that first summer I was in Seattle, Abby and I were driving back to the house where I was living. It was chilly that morning, and she was wearing a puffy white jacket with embroidery on it, sitting in her car seat. As we drove down Roosevelt, headed for the University Bridge and the ship canal, her little voice piped up from the backseat.

“Tea-tea.”

“Yes?” I looked at her in the rearview mirror: tiny in her jacket, wispy blond hair held away from her face.

“Tea-tea,” she said, looking out the window at the traffic alongside us, “I love you all the time.”

At that moment my heart cracked open; it has never gone back to being the same again.

Late that first summer, my brother and sister-in-law took the girls to the East Coast to visit her family and asked if I would drive them to the airport. We all piled into their car, everyone in high spirits. When we arrived at the airport, the girls grabbed their tiny roller bags with their baby dolls strapped to the outside and nearly ran into the terminal, so excited were they for the trip. My sister-in-law raced after the girls; my brother was juggling luggage and travel seats for the kids. I waved to them all and got in the car to drive home.

It wasn't until I pulled away from the curb that it hit me:
What if something happens to them? What if the plane crashes?

Suddenly I was wiping away tears, unable to see the road ahead of me, so overwhelmed I took the wrong lane and drove into the parking garage rather than onto the freeway. I sat there in the dark a few minutes, bent over the steering wheel of my sister-in-law's huge and unfamiliar SUV, weeping, terrified at the idea of losing those girls, shocked at the vulnerability of loving them so much.