Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow (22 page)

It's true. Artichokes sold in grocery stores don't smell like anything. They are trucked in from California, days or weeks old. Even artichokes bought in supermarkets in California don't smell like anything. I felt pride in introducing someone to the real deal.

“That was the best artichoke I've ever had,” Kairu wrote. “It cooked so quickly!”

I liked sharing things from the garden. With all this land, so much was possible. If I had extra, I wanted to pass it along. This was something my mother had never understood.

My mother was generous to strangers, to causes. She donated to many charities, served on the board of nonprofit organizations, sponsored students in developing countries. Once, when I was ten, we took in a Cambodian refugee to live with us. His family had fled the violence and genocide in that country. At the time we didn't have much to spare, but we had more than he did.

My mother might have thought her money could do more good elsewhere—and she may not have been wrong—but I think it went deeper. My mother never learned the give-and-take of community. She was okay donating where nothing was expected in return. To develop an exchange, to connect, was harder. You had to give, but also to receive.

I had problems with this as well. I was okay with the giving part, but the accepting made me feel awkward and indebted. I often tried to calculate the amount of money a friend spent on me, so I could adequately repay them. If I was given a forty-dollar present, I would pick up the tab for a forty-dollar dinner. I hadn't yet learned that true friendship transcends numbers.

If someone was
outrageously
kind—above and beyond the call of duty—it made me feel uncomfortable, unbearably so. I didn't know how to sit with that feeling; I didn't know how to submit to that kind of love. Instead of being gracious, I tried to pretend it wasn't happening. I tried to avoid the person who made me
feel this way. Being outrageously nice was the easiest way to drive me away.

I knew it was ridiculous, but I couldn't stop myself. I had no model for this type of connection. Generosity on that level left me frozen and exposed, like a deer in the headlights. I had nowhere to hide.

I lost friends this way, kind people who didn't understand why their gestures of affection were not being acknowledged.

Sometimes it seemed that I was too much like my mother: Trying to love me was like trying to hug a porcupine as well.

I knew this wasn't the way it should work. It made me feel good to be there for people I cared about. It would have broken my heart if any of my friends had been in need and not let me help. And yet, in turning down help, I was keeping people at a distance. By not letting them be there for me, I was preventing those bonds from growing. I knew it even as I was doing it.

The life I wanted—the community I wanted to be part of—was founded on the back-and-forth. That was how the web was built. I had to be okay with the discomfort. It was easier to stay on my own, but that wasn't going to get me what I wanted.

If the net was there to hold me, I had to learn how to be held.

The chickens had grown all summer, sprouting their adult plumage and changing color. The baby chicks turned from scrubby brown fluff balls into beautiful hens. Their feathers were smooth shades of golden and russet red that glinted in the sunlight. All day long they darted around their yard with the energy of teeny-boppers. Domino, the older, white-and-black-speckled hen, looked positively bored with their juvenile antics.

As the summer progressed, they began to lay eggs. The first were small—the size of a large walnut—but they eventually grew larger and larger. By August we were getting four full-sized eggs
almost every day. Domino's eggs were a pinkish brown, but the younger chicks laid eggs in shades of pale blue-green, like sea glass found on the beach.

With all the chickens laying, there were about two dozen eggs a week. I sent some home with my sister-in-law for the kids to eat and took some back to my kitchen, but I couldn't keep up with the production. I was reminded of a friend who grew up on a farm in the Midwest. When she was young, she said, eggs had not been a year-round thing. Chickens stop laying in the winter; eggs were summer food.

All summer I made frittatas and poached eggs. I put fried eggs on salads, on tortillas, on toast. But still the eggs kept coming. When I went out of town for nearly a week and came home to forty eggs, I laughed. We had an excess—an
egg-cess
. It was almost problematic.

I washed them up and put them in egg cartons and delivered some to my brother and sister-in-law. The rest I dropped off at friends' houses on my way home. I knew my mother would not approve—the eggs were
for family
. But we had plenty, and every day the chickens laid more.

When I ran up the stairs that day to leave eggs for my friend Kate, she opened the door.

“Hey, do you want some fish?” she asked.

I must have given her a funny expression because she laughed.

“My father-in-law went fishing in Alaska. Our freezer is full of fish. Do you want some?”

Usually I would have said no; I would have said I was fine. But I was trying to accept. I was trying to be gracious.

“Sure. I'll take some fish.”

Kate returned with a package of salmon and a package of halibut.

“That seems like a lot,” I said. “Are you sure? It's only a half-dozen eggs.” I was still thinking generosity should be equal, that things should be even.

Kate waved off my concern. “We have a ton. Thanks for the eggs!”

This was what my mother didn't understand: When you pick the right people to be in your web, they give back. If you do it right, you let them. You say please and thank you, and everyone walks away gratified—having been of service
and
been served. This is how the web grows strong.

When I got home and put the fish in the freezer, I smiled. My mother would not have approved, but maybe her life had never felt abundant enough to include this sort of giving—generosity not to those who were starving or fleeing genocide but simply to be kind. Because you wanted to. Because you could.

But here is the thing that made me smile. Here is the thing I thought was funny.

The fish was worth more than the eggs I had given Kate; I'm pretty sure the fish was worth more than
all
the eggs I had given away.

Not that I was keeping track or anything.

That summer in the garden felt like a steamroller. I had gotten used to the overwhelmingness, the feeling like I was never going to keep on top of everything—not even of the weeds. But this year was different. It was drier than it ever had been. Spring had been unusually lacking in rain, something Seattle rarely lacks.

“Is this global warming?” I heard people say when it hit seventy degrees in May.

I liked it when we were playing croquet on the lawn in April and spreading out picnic blankets. By June, however, I could see the damage to the garden. The raspberries had not received their proper dose of moisture in the flower or fruiting stage, and the resulting berries were tasteless. In an average year, they were overwhelming—so many it was hard to keep up with them.
When it rained in June, as it usually did, you had to get picking, or the berries would soon be molding on their canes.

That year it didn't rain in June—it hadn't rained much at all—and the berries were so disappointing I barely picked any. They weren't good enough to eat. Instead of molding on their canes, they withered in the unexpectedly warm sunshine.

Water was something I'd thought about when trying to decide between San Francisco and Seattle. There are plenty of people who consider Seattle's rainfall a drawback, but I put it on the positive side of my pro-con lists.

In permaculture class we had seen maps created by the Department of the Interior that outlined areas of potential conflict over water—the whole Southwest, including California. When I thought about how the climate was changing, it had me worried. California had a year-round growing season, but not much grows without water. Seattle seemed a safer choice.

I felt a little crazy factoring precipitation rates into future life planning, worrying about drought or famine. I felt like my mother, expecting the worst, expecting the sky to fall. But perhaps I was also being like my ancestors, suspicious enough to ensure my own survival. A friend of mine who wrote about natural sciences had told me that animal migration patterns were already changing; they were heading to higher, cooler ground.

In all my consideration of climate, however, I didn't really think it would affect me. If water became an issue, it would be in the future, it would be in California. I hadn't thought I'd be dealing with drought just a few years later. I hadn't expected it in Seattle. But here we were.

A drought is survivable for a garden if you have enough water, but it means you must work harder. The watering routine that usually took an hour and a half now took twice that long; plants I had never watered before now needed it—perennials and fruit trees. Between general garden maintenance and watering, I was run ragged.

Early that spring my mother had arranged to have a catchment system installed to funnel rainwater off the roof of her house into covered holding tanks that could be used to water the garden.

Water catchment was not unusual in Seattle. For years the city had been offering rain barrels at a subsidized rate to residents. They were recycled food-grade plastic fitted with a spigot and connected to a downspout on your house. In times of intense rain, storm water runoff overwhelmed the city drainage system, becoming the largest single source of pollution in local rivers and the Puget Sound. It was better for the city to have water diverted and stored for future use. When I rode my bike to and from the garden, I passed many of these rusty-red barrels installed in people's yards and gardens.

I had suggested we get rain barrels, but my mother had done the city-issued fifty- or sixty-gallon barrels one better. The tanks she was considering had a minimum holding capacity of 250 gallons. Some were as large as 650 gallons.

“Are you sure we're going to need that much?” I asked, as we looked at the spot on the side of the house where the tank was to be installed.

“I figure if I'm going to do this—let's
really
do this,” my mother said.

What she didn't say, what neither of us said, were the
what if
s. But they hung in the air between us that damp spring day.

What if there was an earthquake? What if Mount Rainier erupted, as some said it was poised to do? What if climate change intensified and sped up? What if the worst came to pass? It would be good, then, to have as much water as possible. This was not drinkable water, but it could be boiled for cooking.

If the worst came to pass, we wouldn't be that picky.

We had all watched in frozen terror as a tsunami wiped out the coastal regions of northern Japan two years prior. Before that had been the earthquake in Haiti. That fall it was Hurricane
Sandy, a year later, Typhoon Haiyan. The worst
was
coming to pass for so many people. We needed to be prepared.

I couldn't tell if devastation was happening more frequently, or if modern connectivity just allowed us to watch it in horrifying real-time detail. Devastation had happened throughout history—war, pillage, fire, flood, famine. Those were the times that brought people together. Perhaps that was the truest definition of family:
the people you cared for in times of trouble, those you would shelter from the storm
.

I didn't want to think our times of trouble were here already, but I was glad to have gallons and gallons of water for the garden that summer—the fruit trees, the vegetables, the flowers. We needed it far more than I had expected.

None of my friends saw me much that summer; I was in the garden. My apartment quickly became the place I went to drop things, sleep, work, and leave. I showered there too, staining the bathtub with a dark ring made of garden dirt. My fingernails were never entirely clean. The needs of a garden in drought had taken over.

The physicality of it all surprised me. I remembered a young couple I once interviewed about the farm they had started. “This place beats us up,” they told me, and I now knew what they meant. After nine hours in the garden, I woke the next day feeling like I had been battered, bruised in unexpected spots, sore in ways I never had been before. What was I doing this for again?

But sometimes, at the end of a long day in the garden, I looked up and noticed how the sunlight slanted through the tops of the blackberry bushes; how it was captured in the dahlias I had massed together, which now bloomed in fiery orange and pink, their pom-pom petals waving on long stems in the gentle breeze; how the alpine strawberry border I had planted was now studded with tiny white blooms and small garnet fruit, shockingly
sweet. In those moments it took my breath away. Instead of seeing the weeds, as I usually did, I saw the beauty, and I knew I'd had a hand in creating it.

In those moments the long days and unexpected bruises felt worth it. In those moments it all made sense. None of us knew how long we would be here, what the future held. How better to spend your days than by creating beauty in the small corner of the world that was yours? If that was all I did, it would be enough.

I tried to be brave and invite people to the garden. My mother had redone her kitchen that winter; now it opened up onto the deck, and it was more pleasant to spend time there. We had put the picnic table on the deck, and it was a nice spot to have dinner. From the deck you could almost squint and not see the weeds of the garden, not see how the vegetable beds were wilting and gasping for moisture.

The kids came over. Sometimes it was just the girls; sometimes it was just the toddler; sometimes it was all three of them. They each had their own garden plot. Graham grew carrots, Cate grew carrots and flowers, and Abby wasn't particularly interested in growing anything at all. When some errant Shasta daisies landed in her plot, she was happy to let them take over.