Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow (23 page)

Graham had spent more time in the garden, with his grandma, than either of the girls. He seemed more interested in watering and planting than either of them had. That year my mother bought him his own small red wheelbarrow. “I finally got a master gardener!” she joked, as he watered and dug alongside her.

One day, when it was just the two of us in the garden, I led him over to where I had set up the hammocks.

“Do you want to swing in the hammock?” I asked. He looked up at me dubiously.

“Here, I'll show you”—and I spread the fabric to demonstrate
how it could rock back and forth. He smiled shyly as he began to understand.

I lifted this little boy into the hammock—blond and sturdy and looking so much like my brother had when we were kids and I used to swing him in our hammock out in the country. When I placed Graham in the sling of fabric, he twisted around until he was lying on his stomach, his small face peeking out the side. “Okay,” I said, and began to rock him gently.

The grin that appeared on his tiny face started slow and grew until it nearly split him open, so impish and wide I laughed aloud. “Welcome to the family, little guy. You're a Weaver now”—as if this were the induction ceremony to the run-wild garden tribe that we were. As I had with his sisters, as I had with his father, I pushed the hammock to make it swing. He wouldn't let me stop.

Eventually he reached out his arms so they stretched beyond the confines of the hammock. “Flying,” he said.
“Flying!”

I breathed deep and tried to hold on to that moment, that sunny afternoon in the garden when a little boy took flight for the very first time.

Then I stepped backward, onto a hidden underground wasps' nest. When I felt the hot stings on my ankle and realized what was happening, I snatched the toddler from the hammock and ran for the house as fast as we could go.

Despite the wasps' nests, I had offered to host the cookbook club's annual picnic. The year before we had gathered in a park, but when rain drove us under the shared picnic shelter, we'd had to squeeze between a Peruvian birthday party and a collection of drunken frat boys. In the garden, if it rained, we could shelter in peace.

This meant everyone would see the garden, in all its messy
and drought-strained glory. It wasn't just club members either. The summer picnic was the one gathering where partners and kids were invited too.

When I realized this, I was tempted to cancel, to think up some sort of excuse. But this was about community, about letting people in. Running away was not the answer.

In the past I had gone to great lengths to prepare for company. Once, when I was hosting a dinner for a nonprofit board I served on in San Francisco, I had painted two rooms of my house in advance of their arrival. I told myself it was good motivation for a task I had been meaning to do for ages, but in truth it was a cover-up. Not for the cracks on the ceiling of a charming old building—the cover-up was for me.

There was no way I could fix all that needed to be done in the garden. I didn't even try. I mowed the lawn. I swept up the patio and set out chairs. I bought new lavender plants—something I
had
been meaning to do for ages—but I didn't even manage to plant them.

When the first members of the cookbook club arrived, the lavender plants were sitting in their pots along the side border. They stayed there the whole party, a statement on my lack of perfection, perhaps, but what the heck? A garden is a work in progress—as a life is. It always will be.

I set up drinks on the patio. It wasn't fancy. There was a stack of mismatched vintage plates found at thrift stores—nothing too good to break. There were cloth napkins and Mason jars and homemade lemonade and a huge pitcher of Pimm's with mint and strawberries I had grown myself.

I was still carrying down the last of the beverages as people began filtering in. When one member asked if she could use the kitchen, I took her upstairs to show her around. When I came back onto the deck and looked out at the grass, it was covered in picnic blankets—stripes and checks and flowers. They made up
a huge checkerboard quilt pattern on the lawn. They looked beautiful.

They also neatly covered up the matted dandelions on the lawn.
Bonus
.

That afternoon we ate and drank and lounged on the grass. A toddler staggered around on unsteady legs; a kindergartner made piles of wood chips and told us they were butterfly nests. People wandered down the hill to visit the chickens and went back for more food. It struck me that this is what I had been looking for when I came to Seattle. I had wanted this feeling.

And the sun arched overhead, and the breeze blew through the tall grasses of the meadow, and our laughter cascaded down the hill and filled up the space between the fruit trees. Maybe the neighbors even heard it over their fence.

The next day, when I walked across the grass to gather eggs from the chicken coop, I felt differently about the lawn. It was no longer that awful bit of grass pockmarked with dandelions that I still hadn't gotten around to digging out. It had been transformed by laughter. Now it was where my friends had spread their picnic blankets. It was the lawn on which we had spent the afternoon. It was the place my community had gathered.

I
PLANTED MY TOMATOES
late again that summer, but this time it was on purpose. I had bought twenty-five varieties at the plant sales that spring—by staking and pruning I could fit that many in the side garden. I bought them as small seedlings and kept them in the greenhouse at first, potting them up once or twice as they grew. After a few years in the garden we had plenty of extra pots and, rather than a dreaded chore, I found it was pleasant to spend a rainy afternoon in the relative warmth of the greenhouse, my hands deep in potting soil.

“When are you going to plant those tomatoes?” my mother asked me in mid-May. She was tired of them taking up so much greenhouse space.

“Soon,” I promised.

Spring seemed to come earlier in the Northwest every year; already I could see the effects of the changing climate. Plants were going to seed at unexpected times, flowering out of season.

I wasn't waiting for warm weather, however. I was waiting for the kids.

Finally, on a day when the girls and little Graham were all over at Orchard House, we planted the tomatoes—first ripping out the broccoli that had overwintered in the side garden and gone to seed. The kids liked pulling down the forest of yellow flowers and small leaves. My mother took the stalks to pinch off the flowers to eat. Waste not, want not.

“I've been thinking—when I grow up, I want to live on a farm in the country,” Cate said as we nestled the small tomato plants into the earth. I was surprised. I hadn't heard of her future farming plans.

“Me too,” said Abby.

“Aren't we lucky that Grandma has this big garden for us? It's almost like a farm.”

“Yes,” said Cate, “but it's not a
real
farm.” She was dreaming of cows and horses.

“It's an
urban farm
,” my mother said, using a currently popular term.

“Eww, Abby—you have a bug on you!” Cate pointed to her sister, who had a small black bug making its way up her arm.

With an expert flick of her fingers, Abby sent the small bug flying. “Who cares?” She shrugged. “It's just nature.”

My mother and I looked at each other but said not a word. Were these the same girls who had run screaming at the sight of a gnat? The garden was changing us all.

The whole neighborhood was changing. The girl who lived next door—eleven years old—had fallen in love with my mother's wild back field and begged her mom to let their lawn go as well. Now there were two patches of wild grasses waving in the afternoon breeze.

“You're starting a trend,” I told my mother.

“Good,” she said.

Another day a neighbor from down the street stopped by as
I was bracing the lower limbs of the quince tree out front. “We were wondering if we could ask some questions about your water catchment system,” he asked.

“You'll have to talk to my mother,” I told him. “It's all her doing.”

My mother left for Canada shortly after we planted the tomatoes. She would be gone again for three months, but I was used to the routine by now. Once she left I would clear off the patio, I would organize all the garden gear she left scattered around. When she came back she would complain that she could no longer find anything.

“That's because you're no longer
tripping
over it,” I told her. We were still trying to figure it out, still trying to make things work. I promised myself that in the fall we would come up with a system that made sense to both of us.

The night before she left for Canada, I made my mother a care package for the road. I baked a loaf of the sour-tasting Russian bread I knew she liked, dark with coffee and molasses and caraway seeds. It was a recipe that called for eighteen different ingredients. I made it rarely, only for special occasions. That night I was up late waiting for dough to rise, but I wanted to do it for my mother.

I packaged up the bread, along with a spicy red-bean salad for her to eat for lunch. The trip to the cabin takes most of a day. I was sure she would have been too busy packing to plan a meal for herself.

When I showed up at her house the next morning, my mother was flitting around, squeezing last-minute items into the car, wanting to tell me all the things in the garden that I should water. As if I didn't know.

I gave her the bag of bread and salad and looked at her seriously.

“I know neither of us is very good at loving each other the way we need,” I said, “but I stayed up last night making this for you because this is how I love you.”

My mother didn't skip a beat. “That's nice, but I would rather you had gotten some sleep. You shouldn't stay up late just for me.”

I looked at her again.
“This is how I love you.”

She paused, about to say something, then stopped. “Thank you,” she said. “I will enjoy it.”

That June it was Graham picking raspberries with me in the garden, the same raspberries I had brought up from San Francisco. The cuttings I had planted the first spring at Orchard House had taken root, and the south-side fence was now a forest of green leaves concealing small, sweet berries. One afternoon I took two plastic containers and we walked among the canes to pick the berries, just as I had with his sisters, just as his father and I had when we were children, crushing the soft red fruit in our mouths, letting them thud into our containers, one of the first sounds of summer.

At one point I looked down the row of raspberry canes and saw Graham's small blond head bent over the plastic container he was holding up to his face.

“My precious,”
he whispered to his collected berries.
“My precioussss…”

I was used to the onslaught of fruit by now; I was prepared. When the raspberries came on I made jam and raspberry curd. I froze them. I made pie. And as soon as I made pie, I gathered friends.

One evening the kids and I took a pie down to a North Seattle park, where a wide expanse of grass sloped down toward the water. To swing on the swings there was to soar up over that expanse into an even wider sky and to feel as though you might
actually be able to take flight into all that blue. Every time we went there I was glad these children were growing up in a city so tangled up in nature that it was hard to separate the two.

We met friends there, some of whom had brought desserts of their own. I was calling it a dessert picnic. How better to bring people together than in sweetness and summer? The kids raced across the grass and the grown-ups chatted and the sun slanted toward the west until everyone was bathed in a golden glow so beautiful it almost hurt.

We cut into the pie, the luscious filling staining plates, forks, small faces. Friends had brought a lemon blueberry tart, each berry elegantly arranged, and we savored that as well. When we had all eaten our fill, I pulled out the Hula-Hoops that I had, on a whim, tossed in the car as we were leaving Orchard House. The kids (and a few grown-ups) fell on them with glee, swinging around the plastic hoops, swaying with the motion of it. The niecelets might have had some practice, but no one could hold a candle to my friend's daughter. Ten-year-old Maia kept her hoop in motion seemingly without effort, her slim body rocking back and forth.

I stood there in the glow and took it all in, as if I could affix the scene in my memory for all time: the joy on the kids' faces, the laughter, the friends, the supreme silliness of it all. It was one of those moments you tuck into your pocket to sustain you through the long, dark winter.

“All you do is plan parties and picnics,” my mother had once complained to me.

What I wanted to tell her—what I was coming to realize—is that you have to plan the moments, you have to make the memories. None of us knew what might come next. In September of the prior year I had been picking blueberries with my friend Kim. By November she had been diagnosed with an illness none of us had ever heard of. By April she was gone, leaving a gaping
hole in the community that could never be filled. How could so much energy and fun and wisecracking wisdom suddenly be gone? None of us could understand it.

As Annie Dillard wrote: “We have less time than we knew.”

I wanted my mother to understand that I didn't plan picnics and parties because life was perfect and easy
—I planned them because it wasn't
. I planned them because my friend had died, because another friend's father had been diagnosed with cancer, because none of us knew what the future held. I planned them because, on the long, difficult slog up the mountain, it's important to stop and look at the view. I planned them because what is all the work for if you cannot gather the people you love around you in a golden sunset and laugh together? I planned them because winter was coming and we needed warm memories to sustain us.

We have less time than we knew. I understood that now.

While my mother was preparing to return to Seattle at the end of the summer, I decided to throw a family dinner. Mostly our family dinners took place on birthdays or holidays. We're not like my friend Susan, whose family gathers for dinner every Sunday, rain or shine. But one of the things I dreamed about when we first found the garden was leisurely family dinners at a long table in the sunshine. We had the table and the sunshine; we just needed to gather.

I got my brother and sister-in-law to agree to the plan before I mentioned it to my mother. Maybe I was scared she would say no. Maybe I thought I could surprise her into enjoying herself. This, I soon realized, was not a good idea. She might not appreciate coming home to a house full of people, even if it were her family trying to love her. And when my mother is peeved, she does not hide it.

“What do you think about having a family dinner the day you come back from Canada?” I proposed nervously. “Everyone else has already agreed.”

“I'm not coming down by myself, you know—June is coming with me.”

“That's fine. The more, the merrier. I know the kids want to see you.” It was a manipulative move, perhaps, but I knew my mother would do almost anything if the kids were involved.

“Okay,” my mother said without great enthusiasm. “I would like to see the kids.”

It wasn't much, but it was enough to go forward.

My real plan was that we would all come together to work in the garden—something that, up to then, had never happened. I had asked my brother and sister-in-law for some help in the garden and they had agreed. I could only imagine how happy my mother would be to come home at the end of the summer and see her entire family working together. But when the day came, their schedule had gotten busy and they didn't arrive until just before dinnertime.

The day was hot and sunny and I was running late. There was zucchini to be grated and herbs to chop and fresh pasta to be boiled when my brother and his family showed up, and suddenly the house was full of people and their small, energetic dog, Penny, running from room to room. When the kids had asked, I told them Penny could be included, but I assumed they would keep her outside or tied up. I hadn't imagined she would be bounding around the house, all over my mother's collection of Asian carpets where no outdoor shoes were ever allowed. I winced in anticipation of her displeasure.

When my mother arrived, however, she didn't notice the dog. The house was full of so many people, and as soon as she saw little Graham, she swept him up in her arms and sat down
with him on the love seat in the entryway and the two of them gazed deeply into each other's eyes until their foreheads were touching and they both giggled, and for a moment nothing else mattered.

In the kitchen, kids were running in and out, huge pots of water were being put on to boil, and three different conversations were going simultaneously. It felt like Thanksgiving, a joyful chaos of family and friends and food. It felt like I had always wanted things to feel.

“What can I do to help?” June asked; she is the sort to smooth rough edges and take care of people. I set her to grating zucchini—three pounds of it. My brother took over pasta duty and I chopped the herbs I had picked from the garden and made sure the fruit crisp got into the oven and the frittata was taken out. For a moment we were all working together and I was reminded of how much I love being in the kitchen with my brother. After I left home for college he had taught himself to cook and later spent years working in restaurants; at one point he considered culinary school. Being in the kitchen together reminds me of our commonalities, of what we share. It reminds me that we have the same dry humor, that we finish each other's sentences.

“Penny,” my mom cried plaintively as the dog bounded by her. “You haven't taken your shoes off!” The kids just laughed at her.

We gathered at the picnic table on the deck as the sun went down, and there was wine and conversation and platters of pasta and salad and frittata passed around. Graham insisted on eating only hard-boiled eggs and the girls insisted on sitting at either side of their grandmother and I don't even know what we talked about—but there was laughter and chatter and at one point I looked around the table and felt like my heart could not expand wide enough to take it all in.

After the family had gone home, and June and my mother and I had cleaned up the kitchen, I got ready to go home myself.

“Dinner was really nice tonight,” my mother said. “Thank you for organizing it.”

I waited for the next sentence. With my mother, I was used to there always being something wrong: the dog, the family, the chaos; too much salt in the food.

“But what?” I asked, still expecting criticism.

“But nothing,” she said. “The pasta was delicious.”

“There's more in the fridge.”

“I noticed. I'm looking forward to eating it.”

Sometimes, I thought as I drove home that night, past the houses up the hill with the beautiful views, sometimes even if things don't work out exactly as you planned, they can still be pretty wonderful.