Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow (18 page)

You might think looking after his children would be far more complex, and in some ways it was, but the girls generally told me when something was wrong. My tomato plants would suffer in silence. Making sure they were thriving required a close eye and consistent concern. In some ways, children were more straightforward.

I made one concession to entertainment on our road trip. I asked the girls what music they liked. At five and six years old, Cate and Abby already had pop favorites. But when I went to download their requests, I couldn't find the connection cord and searched and searched without luck. With an early departure the next morning, I finally gave up. We would be on our own, accompanied by the radio and our own imaginations.

It was an hour into our drive when I told the girls about the music. The early excitement had worn off—the anticipation that had them hopping into the car almost before I had come to a full stop in front of their house. They each had little roller bags and books to read and were more wired than I had ever seen them. We were going to the island! We were going to see Grandma! Their parents stood in the driveway and waved as we pulled away, but the girls barely looked back.

An hour into the journey, things had calmed down. We were driving through the green farmland of Washington's Skagit Valley. The sky had grown light, and I braced for the first meltdown of the trip when I told them I'd failed to bring the music I promised.

“That's okay, Tea-tea,” Cate said amiably. “You can do it some other time.”

“Actually,” said Abby, “our favorite game is called Song Turns.”

“How do you play that?” I asked, cautiously optimistic at their good nature.

“We take turns singing to each other,” said Cate. “Here, I'll show you,” and she launched into a tune I had not heard before. Then Abby took a turn; then I sang a song.

We sang our way up the Skagit Valley, across the Canadian border, and onto the large ferryboat that would take us to Vancouver Island. The windows were down, the air was soft and salty, and suddenly it felt like vacation.

We explored the huge boat and, as we approached the city of Nanaimo, we ate Nanaimo bars from the cafeteria, sweet with layers of custard and chocolate. I hoped the girls would remember this special treat. I hoped it tasted like adventure to them.

As we drove up Vancouver Island, on the highway that had been built in the years since I was a child, we played the alphabet license plate game, and when we reached our next ferry terminal just minutes after the boat had pulled away from the dock, the girls didn't complain. Not one cross word. I was impressed with them; I was proud. My friends' fears had been for naught. I'd had faith in us all along.

When we missed the ferry, I pulled out two small kites that I keep in the back of the car, and we walked down to the docks. This was a spot I knew well. My brother and I had spent hours of our childhood here, waiting for the ferryboat. The girls unfurled their strings, and the kites sailed up into the sky, dancing on the breeze, reflecting in the calm waters of the harbor. They laughed in delight, and I felt a throb in my throat.

Here we were, years later—not me and my brother, but me and his children. Somehow we had survived the years of struggle; we had made it through, messily, with our wounds. But here was another generation, these golden girls in their sundresses, to redeem all that had been difficult and dark. It felt like uncommon grace and I wanted to cry from the sheer wonder of it. Instead I watched as their small kites swooped gracefully upward into the widening sky, lazy arcs soaring over still-shimmering
waters, as our laughter filled the harbor and echoed out all around.

The most arduous part of the long day—the only arduous part—was the final twenty minutes. We were off our third ferryboat, on the island at last, but still had quite a drive to the cabin. I remembered this from my own childhood, the mounting anticipation as each familiar landmark came in sight. But the girls didn't know the island the way I did; they didn't know what to look out for. I tried to help them.

“If you look to the left,” I said, “soon you'll see the funniest library ever.” And they looked and around a corner it came: the open-air hut that served as unofficial lending library for the island, where you could exchange a book you already had for one that was new to you or purchase it outright for fifty cents a paperback and a dollar a hardcover. The girls laughed.

“If you look to the right, soon you'll see the harbor.” And there it was—a flash of golden light on water, oyster floats, rocky outcroppings.

“Soon we're going to see the lake. Do you remember swimming in the lake?”

The girls did remember, and they were excited, but twenty minutes can stretch into infinity. Soon Cate was squirming in the back of the car. “Are we
there
yet? We've been driving
foorrreeevvveeeerrrr
!”

“We're almost there,” I promised.
“Almost there.”

Finally we turned off of the pavement and bounced down the dirt and gravel road to the cabin, driving under evergreens whose boughs swept the top of the car. My mother heard the engine and hobbled out on the deck, and the girls tumbled out of the car and ran toward her. When they met on the stairs, two small children embraced their grandmother, and she bent her frizzy gray head toward them, and I sat in the car and felt a throb again in my throat.

It all felt so fragile suddenly. This tenuous bond we had, this life. One wrong step on the stairs and it could tumble down around us. The only binding agent, the only glue we had, was love, and sometimes it felt like we didn't have enough of that.

Our visit unfolded as expected—only a week but it felt longer in all the best ways. We picked blueberries at our friend's farm, coming home with flats of juicy purple fruit. We made fruit crisps, staining the inside of my mother's enameled pot a deep purple, and ate them with milk on the deck for breakfast. We swam in the lake and visited our friends at their farm. But often Grandma needed to lie down, to rest, and when she did the girls played board games with her.

Sometimes I needed to get them out of the cabin to burn off energy. In the afternoons, while Grandma rested, the three of us took long walks down the dirt road, past the horses that lived in a large paddock, and into the woods. One day I brought a paper envelope with us, and we collected seeds from the purple foxglove that dots the forest so we could plant them in the garden when we got home. And another day we drove to the other side of the island so my mother could have an appointment with our friend John.

John was a Chinese medicine doctor and had been treating my mother since long before the back injury. He and his family had moved to the island in the years I was away, and when I returned I was surprised to find them friends with my mother. John and his wife, June, often flew through Seattle when they traveled, and when they did they stayed with me. It was on one of those nights that John tried to help me understand my mother.

“You're never going to get out of her what you want,” he told me. “You can try and try—but it's never going to work. You need someone warm and comforting, but that's not her. So
go find yourself a granny and appreciate your mother for what she is.”

No one had ever spoken to me about my mother like that before—as if they knew her better than I did. And how did he know what I wanted? He barely knew me.

I had always assumed my mother wasn't warm because she had never experienced warmth; that she couldn't delight in me because no one had delighted in her. To John, however, this was better explained through Chinese medicine. Each person has an elemental type, he told me. My mother's type was metal, he said, which is rigid and unbending and demands perfection. Metal is sharp. Those who were metal were often steeped in sadness and overly critical.

My type was earth. We are known to be compassionate nurturers. Earth people like community. They like to cook and dance and be joyful. None of these were things a metal person would find valuable.

I needed cozy, John told me, but metal was the wrong place to find cozy. Metal was more cutting than cozy.

Was that why I was always bitten by my mother's comments, by her judgments? An earth type could be motherly to a metal type, but not the other way around. I could give my mother what she needed, but she could never do the same for me.

“You can try,” he said again, “but it's like getting water out of a stone. You have, what—ten more years together? Why waste that time trying to get something she can never give you? Why not appreciate her for what she is good for?”

“What is that?”

“Metal is good for inspiration. She could help you set up a business.”

This felt like cold consolation. When one wants comfort—wants a
mother
—getting a business partner seems like a lame trade.

Later, however, I thought about my mother and her willingness
to jump in on large projects—like sheet mulching, or growing eighteen varieties of tomatoes. Her enthusiasm extended to other things in my life as well. When the publishing company I had worked for many years earlier turned down an idea I had for a book, my mother suggested I do it anyway. “I'll pay for the first printing,” she told me.

These offers of hers scared me. I wasn't the type to plow forward the way she did. If I shared plans with my mother, she often grew frustrated with my slow progress. She didn't understand I had to battle my own fears before I could move forward, that I was made of less stern stuff. Rather than encouraging, her support felt like pressure.

My mother believed in my ideas more than I did. Her faith in me was terrifying.

The girls liked going to John and June's house because it was home to a large rabbit named Pushkin who roamed loose on the deck. Occasionally June had to scare off hungry bald eagles when they tried to carry Pushkin off in their claws for a juicy meal.

While my mother had her appointment with John, June told us of a new animal who had taken up residence that summer.

Walking in the woods one day, she had found a baby deer lying next to the body of its dead mother, who had been attacked by wolves. Knowing the baby would die without protection, she brought it home and bottle-fed it milk. Now the deer wandered the property, his hindquarters still marked with the white spots of youth.

“If you are gentle,” June told the girls, “you might be able to pet him.”

The four-year-old who lived next door had named the baby deer, so when June walked to the kitchen door and called for the animal she did it by name.

“Squeak-fish,” she called out gently.
“Squeak-fish!”

Soon Squeak-fish the deer came, and the girls were given carrots and warned not to make sudden movements. Then, as if in a fairy tale, they walked out the kitchen door and stood calmly as the baby deer ate out of their hands and nuzzled them with a soft black nose. Abby and Cate slowly ran their small hands over his white-speckled rump.

They looked up at me, and I could see it in their eyes:
wonder
.

When my mother was done with her session, the girls ran to tell her about Squeak-fish (
“We pet a deer, we pet a deer, Grandma, we pet a deer!”
), and John quietly took me aside. “I need to talk to you,” he said. In the midst of the children's excitement, it was easy to slip away and we stood awkwardly in the hallway next to the bathroom door.

“This injury,” he said, “it's a big deal. The severity of it, and your mother's age. If she doesn't recover—and I mean really recover—it could start a downward spiral.”

“What can I do?”

“You need to make sure she takes it easy—really easy.”

“She's not good at that.”

“I know. That's why you need to make sure that she does.”

I nodded silently, soberly.

John looked at me hard. “She really needs to be nurtured—that's all she wants.”

I dropped my eyes to hide tears that had suddenly formed. I didn't really care if John saw me cry. He would think I was sad or scared for my mother, and I was. But that's not why the tears came.

John would never know what rose unbidden in my throat; I would never tell him. I would take care of my mother, I would do my best, but I would never ask the question that came to me that day.

But who is going to nurture me?

T
HE FIRST FEW WEEKS
after she returned from Canada, my mother slipped on the stairs twice. Her feet just slid out from underneath her. “My slippers don't have any traction; they're too slick on the carpet,” she said.

That's when I yelled at her not to wear those slippers—the same way a parent yells at a child who has just barely avoided an accident, an anger that comes from fear.
Do you know how close you came? Do you know what could have happened? Do you know how much I love you? Do you know how scared that makes me?

“Okay, okay,” she said. But still she wore those slippers.

I knew then I wouldn't be going anywhere that September, not to San Francisco as I usually did each September, not to Japan as I had hoped. I needed to stay in Seattle. I needed to keep an eye on my mother.

She was supposed to be lying down, resting, but often I
found her in the garden, loppers in hand, trying to cut back the blackberries, the rhododendrons, the azaleas.

“You're not supposed to be doing that,” I said, feeling like a teacher assigned to yard duty.

“I know. I just need to clip a few—”

“Give me the loppers. I'll do it. You go lie down.”

“Okay, okay,” she reluctantly agreed. It wasn't as if she could argue
—she had a broken back
. But before I knew it, she would be up doing something else. It felt like a giant game of Whac-a-Mole. Every time she popped up, I told her the same thing:
I'll do that; you go lie down
.

The doctors wanted her horizontal, resting, for ten weeks, but my hummingbird mother had no sit-back-and-relax setting. She functioned on one of two speeds:
overdrive
and
off
. Once she was done sleeping, she wanted to get up and be productive. She did not want to lie down. She didn't want to rest. She didn't know how.

Resting now meant spending time on a platform bed in the living room. Her own bed was too soft, not supportive enough of her back, so we set up a futon next to the large picture window in the upstairs living room. From there she had a view down the long yard to the fruit trees in the distance. She could see the whole garden.

This meant she could see every weed that needed to be pulled, every branch that needed to be trimmed. Before I knew it, she would wander out to take care of them. That's when I would find her with loppers or pruning shears. That's when I would tell her to go inside and lie down again.

The bed in the living room made me uncomfortable. It reminded me of the elderly gentleman my mother had bought the house from. We'd heard he had spent ten years in a bed set up in the living room. “This is where I am going to live when I can't get out of bed anymore,” my mom said when we first saw the house. “You can all come to pay your respects.”

My mother was getting older. She was becoming more frail. I was prepared for that—as prepared as one can be. I could imagine taking care of her once she was bedridden.

What I was struggling with was the timing. She had only been in Seattle two years. She wasn't that old. She was still my bossy, stubborn, know-it-all mother. How could she be bedridden?

I hadn't thought we'd be here so soon
.

It had been odd living in my mother's house that summer; it was even odder to be there with her. Always before when I visited, it had been in a house where I had once lived—a house that was also my home. This new house was very much my mother's territory.

Little things set us off. When I woke up in her house that first morning after moving, I noticed my mother had put the toilet paper on the wrong way—with the paper dangling out the bottom rather than hanging over the top. I changed it back, thinking she was off her game. Then I noticed the downstairs bathroom was the same.

“Did you
change
the way you put on the toilet paper?” I asked when she returned from Canada.

“I did,”
she said, a note of glee in her voice. “It took me a long time after you kids left for college to decide how
I
wanted the toilet paper. I like it better this way.”

Parents shouldn't be
allowed
to change what they've taught their children, I fumed silently. All my life I had been trained to hang the paper over the top. Now she was changing the rules?

Of course the real worry lay deeper:
If we could no longer agree on toilet paper, what hope was there for our relationship?

My mother was growing older and changing in ways I could not anticipate or control. Ground I had thought solid was shifting beneath my feet. It felt like a small betrayal, as if I didn't know her anymore. Maybe I never had.

One morning, as I came up from the downstairs office where I was still camped out, I heard a voice talking on the phone. There was no one else in the house, so it had to be my mother, but it sounded nothing like her. She sounded younger, softer. I hesitated on the stairs. If I walked into the kitchen, she would see me, and I knew her manner would change.

That summer on the island my mother had made a friend. I had met her myself when I took the niecelets up there. My mother's new friend Priya had brought her granddaughter to the cabin. The three young girls piled into the hammock with their sun-bronzed legs and their long braids, and I had a moment of wonder remembering how I had made island friends in the summer when I was a child, so glad they were getting this experience too.

I didn't speak with Priya much. I was exhausted by the logistics of our visit—keeping an eye on the girls and my mother all on my own, making sure she rested and they got the activity young kids need and everyone got fed and somehow the dishes got washed. When Priya and her granddaughter arrived, I sat back and watched the girls swing in the hammock and their grandmothers sit in the sun and talk, but I noticed right away that something was different.

My mother does not have relationships of parity: She is mother to her children, teacher to her students, therapist to her clients. She has few friends. This means there is rarely anyone to call her out—to tell her she's being irrational or suggest she rethink a decision. She is the law. This also means there is no one for her to lean on.

Perhaps it was the broken back, perhaps it was just a good match of personalities, but my mother was leaning on her new friend. There was a softness between them I had rarely seen, a level of comfort unusual for my mother. And when Priya left, she gave my mother a jar of homemade yellow plum compote.

“On some miserably gray day in Seattle, you can open it up
and remember summer,” Priya said. My mother looked at her and smiled.

I knew then that my mother had told Priya things—how she hated Seattle in the winter, how she struggled. Priya knew more about my mother's life than I did.

It was Priya on the phone that morning. I heard laughter, giggles. My mother sounded like a young girl. I wasn't trying to eavesdrop, but I sat down on the stairs and listened—not to the words, which were muffled, but to this noise I had never heard before: the sound of my mother's girlish laughter.

That fall my mother was scheduled to have a laser treatment on her skin. Afterward she would have to stay out of all sunlight for three days. There was a dark downstairs room where she could camp out during the day, but she would need someone to bring her food and water until the sun went down and she could move about the house freely.

“Is this a chemical peel?” I asked, surprised that my mother would be doing anything so image focused.

“No—I don't care about things like that,” she said. “You know that.”

She wouldn't tell me much more. Only that the doctors were going to treat some spots on her face that were cancerous and had suggested she do the whole thing. She would have to be dropped off and then picked up at the end of the day. That was it. When it came to her medical condition, I was on a need-to-know basis.

She had always been like this. Once her doctors had accidentally called me with the results of a medical test. I was her emergency contact, and when they couldn't reach her, the office called me to say her neurological exam had come back fine. My mother was furious.

“What neurological test?” I asked. “Why did you need one? Are you having problems?”

My mother wouldn't talk about it. No matter how I tried, the conversation was closed.

“
I'm
going to be the one who has to make medical decisions on your behalf if you are incapacitated,” I told her. “Don't you think I should know what's going on?”

But still, she refused to talk. She had no problem discussing her concerns about my health—she aired them frequently—but her own was off-limits.

I drove her to the hospital the morning of her procedure. It was in an area called Pill Hill by Seattle locals, in reference to the many medical facilities there.

“I always get lost here,” my mother said, staring out the window at the view of Lake Union as we drove down the highway.

“It's the James Street exit, right?” I knew the neighborhood, though I did not know which of the many hospitals we were going to.

“Yes,” my mother said. “James Street, and then turn left.”

“What do I do next?” The left turn had taken us up the hill to a large intersection. “Right or left?”

My mother looked around blankly. “This is where I always get lost.”

“Come on, Mom. Right or left!” I sat poised on the edge of the intersection, the cars behind me starting to honk.

“I don't know.”

“What do your directions say?” She had pieces of paper in her hands, printouts from the hospital with notes written on them.

“I didn't write the directions down.”

“Jeez, Mom
—come on
. You've been here before. When you get to this point, what do you do? Right or left?”

My mother looked around the neighborhood as if she had never seen it before. “When I get to this point, I call the hospital, and the nurses tell me what to do.”

“Mom.”
I swerved across oncoming traffic just before the
light turned red again and we were stuck there. I held my tongue and began to drive down the street. “Does
this
look familiar?”

“None of it looks familiar.”

“What about this?” I pulled up in front of the entrance to one of the hospitals. “Is this where you've been?” But it was Harborview, not Virginia Mason—wrong hospital. I finally exploded in frustration and fear.

“This is no way to live!” I shouted at her. How could the mother I had known—always in charge, always in control—be reduced to this? For a second I took my eyes off the road and glanced in her direction.

My mother—so small she sat on cushions in the car, using them like a booster seat—was staring at the road, tears beginning to slip down her stony face. She made no move to wipe them away.

“I know,” she said quietly, still staring straight ahead. “Don't be angry with me. Getting old is no fun.”

Winter in Seattle is a challenging prospect. The cliché is that it rains all the time—and sometimes it feels like it does—but rain is not the hard part. What is hard is the dark, the bleak. On the worst days, there is no dawn, just a subtle lightening of the pervasive gray. On the worst days, you keep the indoor lights on all day.

At the height of winter, the sky doesn't begin to lighten until after 8
A.M
., and sunset starts at 2
P.M
.; it is fully dark by 4
P.M
. Office workers commute in pitch black. People hibernate. Unless you are proactive, you may not see your friends until spring.

The garden called it quits in the winter as well. In some ways this was a relief—incessant rain means the grass barely grows; most weeds go dormant. If you do a good job of cleaning things up in the fall, the garden sleeps throughout the winter without much need for tending or maintenance. Even things that continue
to grow slow down. The rate at which kale produces leaves in the winter requires great patience.

Being with my mother that winter required great patience as well, which I didn't always have. I buried myself in work, hiding out in the downstairs office, though work was not going well either. The economic downturn was making itself felt in all corners. Where before work had been, if not plentiful, at least available, budgets had now been slashed. And I had spent the summer working less than I should have. When it came to my career and finances, I was bailing water on a sinking ship. That winter felt hard all around. Inescapably hard.

The only bright spots were the afternoons the kids came to play. I was usually working when they arrived, but soon I heard them gallop to the stairs and they burst into the downstairs office, hurtling their small bodies at me. “Tea-tea!” they cried in excitement. “Tea-tea!” On days when my work felt stalled, when it felt like I was failing, having small people simply delighted to see me was like unexpected sunshine, cheerful and warm.

My mother threw herself into these visits. She spent the day before shopping, buying foods she knew the kids liked, making sure she had organic milk in the house. The day after their visits she spent cleaning up the games or crafts scattered around, re-hanging dress-up clothing in the closet, sweeping up crumbs and bits of food from under the dining room table. I knew she loved them coming, but I wondered how long she could keep it up.

The days Graham—the girls' new brother—came to play were easier on her. His needs were simpler, the pace of a baby slower. She was perfectly happy to sit on the floor and roll a ball back and forth with her grandson, for hours if he wanted. It reminded me again of how much seniors can offer, what a good match they can be for small children.

The baby looked exactly like my brother—blond hair with stickup cowlicks and big wide eyes. It was as if my brother had managed to clone himself. As Graham started crawling and toddling
on uneven legs, it felt like we had gone back in time. To see him playing on the same Chinese carpet my brother and I had played on was to feel as if thirty years had somehow vanished, as if I were seeing my brother again as a child. As if no time had passed at all.