Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow (26 page)

I tried to build us a scaffold for Thanksgiving. I researched recipes and borrowed traditions and grew fixated on the details of the day. A casual observer might have thought I was obsessed with the menu, but that wasn't it. I wanted to bind us together, to smooth the edges, to make us a family. Because I didn't know how to do that, I used what tools I had: those in the kitchen.

I suspected my family sometimes saw me as a kitchen fascist—insistent on what size to dice the onion, how long to roast the sweet potatoes. I was just trying to bring us together, trying to feed us, trying to meet my own needs. It was only a meal, but it was all I had.

My first Thanksgiving in Seattle had been my favorite ever. I had just returned from California with news of a book contract. We spent it at The Treehouse: me cooking, my brother and sister-in-law on the couch, little niecelets running into the kitchen to spank me and laugh and run away. I had been gone three months, but they hadn't forgotten me. Abby was not yet three years old, and she wanted to take her nap in my bed, wearing my T-shirt, and we whispered together under the covers. My mother presided over it all, fluttering around in her hummingbird way, and it felt good to celebrate exciting news with this family of mine that felt old and new all at the same time.

The year my mother bought Orchard House, my brother hosted Thanksgiving. When I started bugging him about menu planning weeks ahead, he was noncommittal. He didn't seem to care.

He didn't go grocery shopping until the night before Thanksgiving. Later he told us about a face-off he'd had with another
man over the very last bag of brussels sprouts in the store—akin to the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral. It was a funny story, but it cut a little. This holiday mattered to me.

Instead of us all coming over early, instead of hours of hanging out and cooking and a walk in the woods, that year we didn't get together until late in the day. My brother and his family spent the day together, but my mother and I were not to arrive until shortly before the meal—like invited guests rather than family. It didn't feel like our holiday at all.

When I called my brother that day to check on details, we got in a fight. He thought I was angry about the menu, about what dishes were being served.

“I don't care about the food,” he told me. “As far as I'm concerned, we could order Chinese.”

I didn't know how to tell him what I really felt—maybe I didn't yet understand it myself. It wasn't about the stuffing or gravy, it was about us being together. I wanted to spend the day cooking with my brother in the kitchen, one of the few places I felt close to him. I wanted us to be a team; I wanted us to be family; I wanted it to matter to him as much as it did to me.

So I argued with him about mashed potatoes instead.

Standing on the deck of my mother's house that day as we bickered back and forth on the phone, I had a thought that stopped everything. I thought about my friend Paul.

What if my brother died? What if he were suddenly gone? How sad I would be that I had wasted this time arguing with him. We had wasted years already just trying to figure out how to love each other
.

This Thanksgiving is going to be different, I thought, as I tended my pumpkins and corn and watched the apples ripen on the trees. My mother was still in Canada, my brother and his family gone to the East Coast for their annual vacation; I was the only
one in Seattle. Even though it was August and the holiday months away, I was already making plans.

Really they were spring plans that were now coming to fruition. The wave that was summer had begun to crest. There were baskets of green beans and tomatoes every day, tomatillos and blackberries galore. I hurried them into bags in the freezer, into jam and salsa and blackberry curd. The end of the summer is such a busy time. One of the farmers on the island in Canada had told me, “This time of year, we put up a week's worth of food every day.”

I was watching carefully as well. The pumpkins were growing larger and larger (
squash sex works!
), turning from green to orange. One of them was indeed hanging in the branches of the lilac bush. Every time I walked by and saw them, I felt a swell of parental pride, more than I normally did for the plants I grew. I had helped
create
those pumpkins (there is a high statistical probability they would have been just fine without me).

As August turned to September and October, the planning really began. We would have the roasted root vegetables my mother always makes—beets, carrots, and parsnips, a mass of jewel tones on the plate. My brother would make mashed potatoes from tubers the girls had helped harvest the week before. We had planted them in the beginning of summer. Now, digging underground, we turned up dozens of potatoes with a thin, almost yellow skin; it felt like finding buried treasure.

There would be corn pudding, rich with golden kernels and eggs from the hens. And one of the pumpkins would be stuffed with a filling of chard sautéed with garlic, caramelized onions, bread, and Gruyère cheese. When we cut the pumpkin into wedges, the stuffing would have gone all oozy with cheese, the bread swollen and silky; to me it tasted better than turkey.

My shopping list for the meal was almost all dairy: milk, butter, cheese, cream, and a few lemons. When I thought of
what is usually involved in shopping for Thanksgiving, I smiled. All my purchases fit in a hand-carried basket, and I stood in the ten-items-or-less line and watched people pushing heavy carts piled high.

There were other things on our menu as well—a cheese plate with pickled green tomatoes, tangy and sour. There were pickled Asian pears with allspice, cinnamon, and Aleppo pepper. And one early fall day, Knox and I spent an entire afternoon pickling the tiny green figs on our tree that never got fully ripe.

The recipe Knox wanted to try was a traditional one, requiring us to blanch the figs in multiple changes of water to rid them of any bitterness before they were simmered in spiced sugar syrup. It was a laborious process—from an era when you worked hard to make even unripe fruit palatable. A time when food was precious, as important as the seeds in your storehouse and the chance of rain and a strong family to help you work the fields and bring in the harvest.

We had begun calling the day not Thanksgiving but Harvestfest.

The kids helped us cook the meal. I taught them to make pie the way my friend Kate taught me: without worrying about ripped dough. We chopped apples from our trees and mounded them high. When I placed the top crust, we crimped the edges, painted on an egg wash, and sprinkled the pie with sugar. Then we slipped it into the oven and watched through the window as our pie baked and browned and filled the entire house with the sweet scent of autumn.

When it was done, it joined other pies already made—a pumpkin and a mincemeat (one must do something with all those green tomatoes). Some might say three pies were too many, but I figured we'd struggled enough with the bitter; it was time for sweet.

When at last we sat down that afternoon, it was to a meal made of memories. The mashed potatoes tasted like the summer
day the girls and I had slipped their brown quarters into the soil. The pudding was hot August when the corn silk tassels had waved and I had tried to construct a barrier to keep the raccoons out. The applesauce was made of days in the kitchen with the kids, their delight at cranking the apple peeler, preserving the harvest. The kale salad tasted of early, wet spring when my mother planted the greens that helped feed me what I needed. The pickled figs were the flavor of friendship, an afternoon spent in someone else's kitchen, trying something new.

I watched my family eat what I had planted and tended. These tiny seeds had already yielded so much. Here we were, so far from that little house in the country, all together, with our own harvest: a fruitful garden still out of control, my mother getting older, the kids growing as fast as the weeds, but more gentleness, more understanding between us with each season. I still had hope.

To me it felt like a beginning. There was much more I wanted—to plant currants and grapevines, and start a canning club, and host a cider-making party in the fall, and grow mushrooms on logs. Perhaps next year I would even stay on top of the weeding; I would manage to dig the dandelions out of the lawn. Maybe not.

But next year I hoped for more people at the table, more friends who felt like family. The people I leaned on and loved and let catch me were not just my relatives any longer. I felt lucky that way. The table was growing longer, year by year.

We'd need more food, of course, but that wasn't a problem. We just had to start earlier, sprout more seeds, dig another vegetable bed. It was all possible if we were willing to put in the time, the effort, to tend our crop, to care for the harvest, to care for each other.

The garden was here. We had only just begun to grow.

For my family

This book owes its existence to my smart, feisty, and fierce-hearted friend Kim Ricketts, who, one night at Contigo in San Francisco, leaned over the table to where I was chattering on about the garden my mother was buying in Seattle and looked at me intently. “You
have got
to write about this,” she said, “you know that.” And because Kim was always right, I did.

I'm so sad Kim is not here to read the final product, but her spirit and all that she taught me about family and community and kindness are in these pages. Thank you, Kim. I'll miss you forever.

This book found its way forward thanks to my friend and agent Danielle Svetcov, who is also smart, feisty, and fierce-hearted. Thank you for championing my work, for being patient with long gestation periods, and for not killing me when I let your daughter use the kitchen knife. Chats with you are one of the highlights of this gig.

This book would not have been completed without the support, good cheer, and excellent feedback given by the women in my writing group (smart, feisty, and fierce-hearted, all of them). Erica Bauermeister, Randy Sue Coburn, and Jennie Shortridge, outstanding writers themselves, generously and gracefully helped shepherd the wayward child forward. For this, and for regular
deadlines, writerly commiseration, and champagne corks out the window, I cannot thank you enough.

This book owes its final form to the support and vision of editor Pamela Cannon at Ballantine, who gave it a very soft spot to land. A finished book is always the work of many hands, the author's being only the first. To Pamela, and to Betsy Wilson, Loren Noveck, Katie Herman, Robbin Schiff, Susan Turner, and Simon M. Sullivan: Thank you for giving
Orchard House
a home, and for making it far, far better than I ever could have on my own. And thanks to Lindsey Kennedy, Quinne Rogers, and David Glenn, for helping the book out into the world.

To my readers, who have cheered me along from the start, and waited very patiently while I have been working on this project, thank you for your generosity, for your support, for saying you would wait until I was done. You have no idea how much it means.

Writers do not exist without mentors and companionship. Thanks to my teachers Barbara Owens, Elaine Johnson, Patricia Holland, and David Arehart, and in memory of John Nicholson (I have never forgotten that John Ciardi assignment). Thanks to Elmaz Abinader and Sarah Pollock, and in memory of the late, great Amanda Davis. To my Mills compatriots, Litquake, and the gang at Seattle7Writers, a grateful toast. To Anne Patchett, for saving my writer's sanity a time or two, Anne Lamott, for showing me how important it is to write truth about hard things, and Cheryl Strayed, for reminding me to be brave on the page and in life.

Thanks also to the Mesa Refuge writers' residency, for the opportunity to work on this book in a stunningly beautiful place, and deepest appreciation to Dr. Brené Brown, for giving me both an understanding of and a language to describe the concept of vulnerability. To Amanda Soule and family, for inspiration, and to Elaine Petrocelli and family at Book Passage, for giving me an extraordinary bookstore to grow up in.

I would not be here today without the support of my friends. Thank you to the Cookbook Club women (smart, feisty, and fierce-hearted, all of you), to Rebekah Denn and family, Myra Kohn, Michelle Hamilton, Knox Gardener, Paul McCann and family, Megan Gordon and Sam Schick (for telling hard truths), Sian Jones, Lian Gouw, Andrea J. Walker, Anne Livingston, Mari Osuna, Adam de Boor, Jennifer Johnson, Meg Peterson, my friends at Camp Unalayee, the community at Book Larder—and to Molly Wizenberg, Brandon Pettit, and the gang at Delancey, who make the meals that put my pieces back together.

Thanks, especially, to Ginnie and Bruce Ellingsen, who made a little girl feel at home; to Lorraine Ginter, for being the best babysitter we ever had, and for getting me curious about cooking; and to John Preston and Fawn Baron (otherwise known as June), for caring.

Thanks also to the many farmers, permaculturalists, and food folks who have inspired and helped educate me (any mistakes are very much my own). To Billy Allstot of Billy's Gardens; Adam Schick of Linnaea Farm; Casey and Eric Reeter from Wilderbee Farm; Don Ricks and Ingela Wanerstrand of Friends of Piper's Orchard; Gail Savina of City Fruit; Cole Tonnemaker of Tonnemaker Farms; Novella Carpenter of Ghost Town Farm; Dr. Stephen Jones of WSU Mt. Vernon; permaculturalists Jenny Pell, Marisha Auerbach, and Kelda Miller; Nazila Merati for #askabotanist; Jon Rowley for strawberries; Flatland Flower Farm for those first raspberry canes; Margaret Roach and Gayla Trail for inspiration and education; Michael Pollan; Seattle Tilth; and the Master Gardener program of King County. And thanks to Jill Lightner and
Edible Seattle
for giving me the opportunity to meet so many of these fine folks. And to chef Dan Barber of Blue Hill Restaurants, for a life-changing story, and Kate McDermott, for lessons in pie and graceful living.

As much as I miss my San Francisco friends (I do, I so do), I really have found a community in Seattle that I hadn't thought
possible—thanks to all who are part of it (far too many to list here, a happy fact). Thank you, particularly, for putting up with my many absences and canceled camping trips while working on this project, and special thanks to Katie Briggs, for the best deadline care package ever; to Kate Vander Aa, for constant cheering, many car rides, and that amazing email; to Hsiao-Ching Chou, for wontons when needed, birthday cupcakes, and the Dimples; to Ellen Pohle for plates of dinner, mojitos, and berry picking; to Leslie Seaton for cheering cards, long talks, and camping trip organization; and to Lianne Raymond and Mary Plummer Loudon, for love and support in keeping the ship sailing forward. I couldn't have done it without you.

Finally, thanks to my family, who are dealing quite well with the trial of having a writer in their midst. To my mother, for giving me gardens, for letting me share her story, and for believing in me so much it's scary; to my brother and sister-in-law, who in their children have given me the best gift of my life; and to the kidlets, who are smart and feisty and fierce-hearted as well. You make it more fun to be on Team Weaver than I ever imagined possible. I love you all.