I DON’T REMEMBER HOW I got the idea, but after a few years in the garden, I decided to grow our annual Thanksgiving dinner. We had already grown so many things—lettuce, berries, tomatoes, radishes, kale, peaches, zucchini. Never mind that none of these items were on a traditional Thanksgiving menu; once I had the idea in my head, I couldn’t shake it. Thanksgiving is a harvest festival. I wanted to celebrate with a harvest of our own.
The fact that most of my family is vegetarian made it easier—my brother and I eat meat, but no one else does. We hadn’t served turkey on Thanksgiving for many years. There would be no need for a poultry harvest at Orchard House.
There would be pumpkins, however, and corn and cranberries. We’d have brussels sprouts and green beans, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and apple pie. All those things were possible. I just had to make it happen.
I was probably the only person planning my Thanksgiving menu in March, as gray drizzle fell from Seattle skies and the tulips had not yet bloomed, but this would not be a quick process. One does not decide in July or August to grow a Thanksgiving meal. It seemed odd to be thinking about apples and pumpkins when the garden was still asleep, but I needed to start in early spring, when everything was still just hope and possibility.
That spring at the plant sale, I stocked up, purchasing a container of pumpkin starts that held three small seedlings. There were four tiny brussels sprouts as well, surely enough for us all, and I ordered five cranberry vines from a fruit-tree catalog. I planted them all in the earth on a late-spring day when the sunshine had just begun to have some warmth to it, when it felt like summer might be around the corner, when the season stretched ahead full of potential.
The first surprise came with the cranberries. Five vines had sounded like a lot, but they arrived thin and wimpy looking. I knew plants sometimes start small and then take off, like teen boys who sprout up seemingly overnight. I tried not to be like my mother and assume the worst. I tried to have faith.
Despite my positive outlook, the cranberries did not fill in. As spring turned to summer, they flowered—small blossoms that would eventually turn to fruit. But here was another problem. If you counted them all up, between the five vines, there were exactly seven flowers.
If everything went well, if they didn’t fall prey to bird, bug, snail, or slug—or spontaneously fall off the vine for no apparent reason (this happened with alarming regularity), we would have exactly seven berries.
Seven berries were not enough to make cranberry sauce; seven berries were not enough to garnish cocktails. I wasn’t sure there was anything you could do with only seven cranberries. Place-card holders on the Thanksgiving table?
I told myself it would be okay. The kids didn’t even like cranberry sauce.
Next came the brussels sprouts.
Growing up on the California coast, I had been used to brussels sprouts—thick, stubby stalks festooned with tiny, cabbagelike heads. I thought they were funny looking. When seen as a pile of baby cabbages in the market, they look adorable; on the stem they look like a surrealist vegetable mash-up.
That year the brussels sprouts took their revenge on me and refused to grow, remaining small and stunted even late into the summer. I didn’t know then that brussels sprouts often do not thrive in the Northwest. It’s hard to grow them to a decent size.
Even the pumpkins gave me a run for my money. There had been three seedlings in the pack I bought: three tender shoots, their secondary leaves already unfurling, prickly and green.
I planted them in the side garden, where the soil was excellent and they would get plenty of light. As soon as I did, one of them withered and died. I had watered them equally, and the other two were doing fine. I stood there looking blankly at the now-brown shoot.
Our statistical chance of pumpkin pie had just dropped by 33 percent. Who knew if there would be a Thanksgiving dinner at all?
My menu might have been in jeopardy, but the event itself was never in question. Of all the holidays, only Thanksgiving belonged to my family. Other secular holidays—the Fourth of July, Memorial or Labor Day—we never spent together.
The religious holidays were more complicated. My mother’s family had not been observant, but in raising children, she wanted us to know the culture we had come from. So we lit Hanukkah candles, and if we were lucky, there were latkes, though my mother was never a fan of potatoes or deep frying. But there was never any community, no gathering. The three of us sat at the kitchen table in that house in the country and spun the dreidel all alone.
What community we had came with Christmas, when the entire neighborhood gathered at the home of the family with the largest house—a huge, barnlike structure the husband had designed and built himself. They were of German descent, and their Christmas tree, which soared up to the second story, was decorated with real candles that glowed through the evening and seemed to touch everything with magic. At some point in the evening, Santa Claus would appear and pass out a gift to each and every child. One year I found a small pink diary hidden in my mother’s closet, and when Santa gave it to me at the Christmas party, I realized the parents were supplying the gifts.
My mother wasn’t fond of Christmas, but she wasn’t sure how to avoid it. There were craft fairs in town, festive gatherings among friends and at school, decorations in stores and on houses. It’s hard not to notice Christmas if you live in mainstream America.
Every year my mother swore she wouldn’t fall into the Christmas trap. She didn’t like the holiday, didn’t believe in the commercialism, the excess. The truth is she also couldn’t afford it.
Every year she held out until Christmas Eve. That was the day she could no longer be strong, the day she couldn’t bear to disappoint her children.
“I always ended up buying some stupid plastic crap—just to have something to give you,” she told me many years later. “You know those glitter stars? I bought them at the drugstore on Christmas Eve. I had to get something; they were the only things I could find.”
The stars were made of clear plastic filled with water and silver glitter. When you shook them or turned them upside down, the glitter scattered to the bottom as in a snow globe, shining and sparkling. My brother and I had loved them and spent hours watching the glitter sink slowly through the water, gleaming as it fell. The stars now sit on a shelf in the bedroom my mother has for her grandchildren. They sparkle still.
It would be years before I heard the other reason my mother didn’t like Christmas.
When my mother was a little girl of six or seven, the other children in her school threw rocks at her—they stoned her. They shouted and yelled at her because her family was Jewish; they told her she killed Jesus.
“What did you do?” I was horrified. I had been raised in a time and place that embraced diversity. I couldn’t imagine such a thing.
“I was young, but I was smart,” my mother said. “And I was good at history. I shouted back, ‘I didn’t kill him—the Romans did!’ And I ran away as fast as I could.”
Christmas is a complicated thing, even when you don’t celebrate it.
As adults we did not spend the holiday together. My brother spent it with his children and in-laws, a flurry of wrapping paper, and a twelve-foot-tall Christmas tree. When I lived in San Francisco, I relied on the generosity of friends, glad to have it but sad I did not have a family to go to, a place where my presence was expected. The anxiety over where I was going to be for Christmas started up every fall.
My mother vanished for the holiday. She went to her cabin in Canada and retreated from the world. She read books; she slept; she ventured out only if friends invited her over. She said she was happy being alone.
I joked that she was fleeing—the country, the commercialism, the dominant religion she did not share, the excess and waste, the cheap plastic crap. It was everything she did not believe in.
She ran away, as fast as she could.
After initial disappointment with the pumpkin seedlings, the two that survived grew strong. Floppy lobed leaves sprouted from thick and prickly stems; thin tendrils reached out to grasp whatever they could to support the vines’ growth. They reminded me of the decorations on Cinderella’s carriage.
One of the stems shot out of the side garden and into the lilac bush nearby. It grew into the branches, threading its way through the leaves and woody stems until it was impossible to untangle the two. Perhaps we would have orange pumpkins hanging from our lilac that year.
Eventually, after much hope on my part, flowers emerged—tissue-paper thin and colored like the sun. They unfurled slowly, these big showy flowers. I eagerly checked their stems.
All squash, including pumpkins, produce male and female flowers—you can see the gender at the base. The male flowers have long, slender stems, while female flowers feature a round, slightly swollen bump. It is this bump that, once pollinated, grows larger and larger and eventually becomes a pumpkin or other squash. The first few flowers the vine produces will always be male. It is only when there is enough pollen available that a female flower is produced.
I hadn’t known the excitement of that first female flower—the swollen stem that holds the potential for fruit. It’s not the same strange wonder as when a friend becomes pregnant and you realize she holds future life inside her, but it’s not unrelated either.
Unlike with female pregnancy, that swollen stem is just potential, not the event itself. To be expecting in the squash world requires a visit from a bee that has already visited male flowers and picked up pollen on the tiny hairs of its body. In the squash world, conception requires a middleman.
Despite my earnest attempts to be hopeful—at least more hopeful than my mother—I was worried. It seemed such a gamble. What if a bee never came? (They had been dying off lately.) What if it was her first stop of the day, and she hadn’t picked up enough pollen? What if she had the wrong pollen? Female flowers were open for only a day or two. There wasn’t a lot of time to get this right.
In human fertility terms, it was akin to leaving a vial of sperm on the side of the road and hoping that someone would come along and be nice enough to deliver it to the doctor’s office down the street within the required time period. Nature is exquisitely attuned and mind-blowingly intricate, but this seemed a long shot. What if it didn’t work?
When the first female squash flower withered on the vine and the round, swollen bit turned soft and yellow and dropped off, I grieved. I decided I needed to do something about this. Perhaps I wasn’t so hopeful after all.
One mid-August day I stood in the side garden and hand-pollinated my pumpkins. I’d heard you could do this, but I had never tried before. I picked a male flower and carefully peeled back the thin, damp petals. What I saw when I got down to the business surprised me.
The male pumpkin blossom had a center protrusion that tapered slightly and then swelled round and long, covered with golden pollen. It took me aback. I knew it was the flower part called the stamen, but it definitely looked phallic.
When I carried it over to the open female flower, things got stranger still. In the center was a circle of yellow bits—the stigma—that spouted up like a fountain and curled backward in a manner reminiscent of the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe.
Then, in the center, was something that looked surprisingly like a hole.
What was I to do? I blushed. I looked around awkwardly to make sure no one could see me. Then I stuck the long, thick golden male stamen deep into the hole.
But first I rubbed it quickly around the outside of the opening. Because I thought the poor female flower deserved a decent chance of enjoying herself.
Growing up we usually spent Thanksgiving at home. Occasionally other people joined us, but rarely the same person twice. People came in and out of our lives like flowing water in the early years. Sometimes they were from my mother’s past, or her current colleagues. A few times when I was very young, we went to someone else’s home for the holiday, but that was rare.
What I remember is this: a day spent together, hanging out, cooking. There was usually a walk in late-November sunshine that was still golden even though the leaves had already turned. In the early days, we were out in the country, in the ramshackle house with the old apple trees. In my teenage years, we spent Thanksgiving in my mother’s kitchen, with its big windows and the leafy yard all around, a huge maple tree flaming scarlet.
My first year of college, we had our meal there, with a teaching colleague of my mother’s who had become a friend. Then we all drove out to the beach to see the small cabin my mother and this friend had begun to rent as a weekend getaway.
When we walked out on the deck and saw the view—the wide-open panorama of the Pacific stretching to the horizon—my brother said what everyone had been thinking: “Why didn’t we have Thanksgiving here?” After that, and for all the rest of our California years, we did. I thought we always would.
Thanksgiving was important to me. It was a day based on gathering, coming together, sitting down around a large table. It celebrated food and harvest and excluded no one. If someone had made a national holiday just for me, it would look a lot like Thanksgiving.
As with so many things, I wished we had Thanksgiving traditions—a family stuffing, an apple pie recipe passed down from a grandmother. I envied those whose repeated rituals had worn grooves deep and wide; such things provide guides in life, a way to navigate, assurance that you are on the proper path. In my family, it felt like we were careening all over the place.
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.