THE IDEA THAT MY family might garden together was somewhat absurd. We weren’t a teamwork family, the sort that does things together. We didn’t have Sunday dinners, we didn’t go on family trips or hold reunions—we didn’t even barbecue. We gathered dutifully for birthdays and muddled through holidays as best we could. It’s not that we didn’t love each other. I’m just not sure we knew what to do next.
I always hoped we could be more—but I didn’t know how to make that happen. If there was an instruction manual on family unity, we hadn’t received ours. Instead we were stuck making it up as we went along.
My mother left Seattle the day after our berry excursion and arrived in California the following afternoon. She then walked across the street to her neighbor, who was a real estate agent, and put her house on the market. “I don’t want to fix it up,” she told him. “I don’t want to do anything. I just want to sell it.”
A week later, at the broker’s open house, she did just that. This left her thirty days to pack up the entire house and be gone.
Two weeks later I was in California, surrounded by boxes and the rubble of my childhood. There was a yawning dumpster in the driveway and a series of moving pods that were slowly being filled with my mother’s belongings. The life that had been lived in this house for the past twenty-four years was being systematically dismantled.
Everywhere I looked there were memories: the Chinese carpet where my brother and I had staged renditions of Broadway musicals; the bushes out front where I used to hide the ugly bike helmet my mother made me wear to school. I could still navigate the downstairs hallway without need of a light. My hips swiveled to avoid the corner of the washing machine, my foot naturally stepped wide on the creaky stair. My relationship with this place defied words. Every object, every corner made me stop and sigh. I was drowning in memories and nostalgia. My mother was much more businesslike.
“Do you think you could go any faster?” She had found me stalled over an elementary school knitting project I’d unearthed in a basket in the garage: a mitten, only half-done, abandoned and forgotten years ago.
“I can’t believe you still have all this.”
The garage still had everything. There was the printing set that had been used to make my baby announcements, a kendo uniform from my brother’s brief stint in martial arts, racing tires for a bicycle that had once belonged to me. There were also things in the garage that predated my memory.
“Are these yours, Mom?” I was sorting through a musty cardboard box I’d never seen before.
The box was full of gardening books. There was a paperback copy of the original organic gardening encyclopedia by J. I. Rodale. The collection included The City People’s Book of Raising Food and hand-lettered pamphlets out of Berkeley on how to make compost. Digging below, I felt newsprint and pulled up a copy of the Whole Earth Catalog. As I fingered the fragile pages, a thought occurred to me.
“Hey, Mom. Were you a back-to-the-lander?”
I had heard of the back-to-the-land movement. In the late sixties and the seventies, across America, thousands of young people moved to the country to grow their own food. Some had become disillusioned with modern life; others were spurred by the energy crisis or the environmental movement. I had friends who grew up on a farm their parents had carved out of the Idaho wilderness, but I had never thought it had anything to do with us.
She glanced over at the books I was holding. “What do you mean?”
“You know—back-to-the-land. Is that why we moved to the country?”
“You mean the hippies? I was never a hippie, you know that.”
“Not hippies—farms and communes and growing your own food. There was a whole movement.”
My mother shrugged. “I don’t know anything about that.”
“Then why did we move out of the city?”
She sighed, brushing back strands of wavy gray hair that had worked their way loose and now framed her face, wiping her hands on a worn sweatshirt that might once, many years ago, have belonged to me.
“I wanted you kids to grow up in nature,” she said, leaning against the doorjamb. “I wanted you to know that carrots came from the ground, not the supermarket, that eggs don’t magically appear in Styrofoam cartons.” She looked small and tired.
She sighed again, before turning back to her own boxes. “I was never part of a movement. I just wanted you to have a garden.”
An anthropologist might argue the case differently. Because she moved to the country in the early seventies in order to grow food, my mother might be considered part of the back-to-the-land movement, but there is one key difference. A movement is an effort by a large number of people organized together. It implies cooperation, community. My mother might have ordered her tools from the Whole Earth Catalog and bought the books and pamphlets of the era, but she did not organize; she did not commune. My mother did it alone.
Not long after my father left, she moved to the country with two small children. There she chopped wood and fed chickens—and battled the raccoons that tried to attack in the night. She dealt with winter storms and frequent blackouts and a seasonal creek that sometimes overflowed its banks. None of these were things she had grown up with. She was a city girl, though a few years living in remote Big Sur and on a small Canadian island had worn off that sheen. Still, raising two children on your own is hard when you don’t have to chop wood and grow your own food. Why make extra work for yourself?
The answer is survival. When my mother bought a third of an acre with room for chickens and fruit trees and a creek running through it, there was peace of mind in knowing, no matter what happened, she would be able to feed her children. The land was her sense of security.
There’s a whole different story that could be told about why such security is important to my mother. It might be because of her own poor and difficult childhood, where her mother died early, and she earned her own keep, and food was a commodity not to be taken lightly. Perhaps the answers lie deeper, handed down in genes that remember what it was like to be hungry, to be hunted. My mother shares blood with those who fled the Cossacks, the pogroms, the Nazis. Ownership of land, the ability to raise food, was a shot at a future.
When we found the Seattle garden, it felt like the pendulum had swung back to where it had been in the late sixties and early seventies: economic woes and environmental fears. People were rethinking their front lawns and considering tomatoes instead. Sales of seeds had skyrocketed; the waiting lists at community gardens were suddenly years long. Local foods were booming. Were we going back to the land again? In precarious times, was the ability to raise food still our best shot at a future?
I took the dusty books off the shelf in the garage that day. The gardening books, their covers wavy with age, the handdrawn pamphlets—all tools used to spread a message, to usher in a new age, a better way of life. I put them in a new box to take to Seattle, to the new garden.
I took something else from the garage that day, a scrap of fabric from a dress my mother used to wear when I was a little girl. It was a wraparound dress, the sort popular at the time. I still remember the long ties looped around her small waist, how the skirt flared when she turned.
I took the fabric to remember a young woman who moved to the country, alone with two small children. She might not have known what she was in for, but she dug a life for us out of local dirt and her own grit. When I think of it now, I am astounded. How hard it must have been, how we all struggled, how brave she was to even try.
In the midst of that month of packing, my mother flew up to Seattle for the inspection on the house with the garden. After it had sat on the market for a year with little interest, there were multiple offers as soon as my mother showed up. For a while it seemed possible she might have gambled and lost: sold her California house for nothing. In the end, a clever escalation clause got her offer accepted.
We arrived for the inspection on a day that was gray and overcast. The house looked worse than I remembered: small, dingy bedrooms, a kitchen and bathroom that had been cheaply overhauled before the place was put on the market. The house had been added to over the years, resulting in an awkward layout that included a living room jutting into the garden. Here the elderly gentleman who was selling the house had spent the last few years: in bed with a view of azaleas and rhododendrons.
“This is where I am going to live when I can’t get out of bed anymore,” my mother said as we walked through the empty house, footsteps echoing on wooden floors. “You can all come to pay your respects.”
That’s the sort of humor my mother has, a dark and sarcastic sensibility shaped by struggle.
I was looking at the house the same way. Were the hallways wide enough to accommodate a wheelchair? At seventy-two my mother was in good health, but this was for the long haul. With the extra bedroom and family room on the lower level, the house was large enough to accommodate a caretaker living there.
“Is your mother worried about resale value?” the real estate agent asked me.
“She’s not going to be the one selling it,” I told him. I knew this would likely be my mother’s last home.
Despite the house, the property seemed like a gift—this much land in the city, fruit trees, a greenhouse. It would be a family farm we could work together, a place for my nieces to grow and run wild, a source of security my mother would pass down to me and I would eventually pass on to the girls. No one was thinking of selling.
If the worst came to pass, as economists and environmentalists were forecasting, it would be possible for our entire family to live and grow much of what we needed in this large new house and yard. I suspect other people don’t plan for worst-case scenarios like this, but other people didn’t grow up in my family.
All through the discussion with the inspector about water damage and drainage issues, my attention kept shifting to the garden outside the windows. The windows whose seals had failed and would need to be replaced. The house felt like a necessary evil; it was the garden I cared about.
The night after the inspection, we talked about the garden.
“Where would you put the raspberries?” my mother asked as I stood leaning against the doorway of the room she stayed in when she visited. She was in bed already, the reading lamp next to her casting wild shadows against the walls and high ceiling.
“Down along the fence, on the left side.” I imagined a wall of raspberries, red and golden, growing in the sunshine of the south end of the yard. Bowlfuls of tender ruby thimbles to be picked on summer days, a crush of tart sweetness in the mouth.
“What fruit trees would you grow?” she asked.
It had been years since my mother had truly gardened. The winter I was eleven a storm had flooded our area, knocking down fences, carrying away picnic tables, and nearly evacuating our town. Houses slid down hillsides as the water-saturated earth gave way, and people canoed the streets on rising floodwaters the sandbags couldn’t restrain. Northern California was declared a disaster zone.
When the floodwaters receded, our garden was covered with a fine sandy silt and knee-deep muck. We moved not long after that, partially to be closer to the city where my mother was then working and partially, I think, because she didn’t have the heart to rebuild her garden. She tended the fig trees already growing in the leafy yard we moved to, but she hadn’t planted a vegetable garden again.
Growing up, I had never liked gardening. I remembered the weeding chores of my childhood, the wait for something to grow and become ripe. Gardening seemed to belong to those more accustomed to the passage of time and less anxious about it. I was too young, too impatient. For years, however, I’d had a sneaking suspicion that gardening was lying dormant in me and would eventually awaken. It was only with my move to Seattle that I had taken up the trowel for real.
It was an odd thing, my mother asking my opinion like this. As the lone grown-up in charge of my childhood, she had been the law. Yet I had recently completed a six-month permaculture training course, and it was possible that I now had more gardening knowledge than she did. It was more recent knowledge, at least.
Still, it was strange to have her defer to me, even in this small way. It made me feel as if the earth were shifting ever so slightly on its axis—nearly imperceptible and yet profound.
I pushed away from the doorway and walked around to the far side of the bed, pulling back the covers and slipping under them next to her. This was not something I usually did. Most of the time I tried to keep my distance with my mother, tried to keep my boundaries.
If my mother noticed, she made no comment.
We planned an orchard lying there in bed. Cherry trees for my mom who loves them, a quince and Italian prune plum for me, a persimmon, which we both like. There was enough land in the garden to dream big, wildly. There would be blueberry bushes, a potato patch, kiwi vines, strawberries. We talked about corn and tomatoes and trellises for green beans and peas. We’d plant zucchini. (“Only one,” my mom warned. “You never need more than one zucchini.”) There would be seeds to start in the greenhouse early in the year and then move outside. A fragrant and fruitful garden grew in our heads before a single weed had been pulled or speck of soil amended.
“You know we’re giddy about this?” my mom said quietly, and she was right. We were both so excited about the idea of this huge garden.
Happy is not a word often associated with my mother—never giddy. But this garden felt like the beginning of a new chapter for all of us. Perhaps things could be different this time.
The next day my mother took my nieces to the garden, to play in the fall sunshine. The inspection was done, but the house was still not ours; it didn’t seem to matter. In every other way, the garden belonged to us.
I met them there later to drive everyone home. I came around the south side of the house, past the weed-strewn side yard and through the wooden gate that still held the NO TRESPASSING sign.
I heard the laughter before I saw them, the girls’ faces again streaked with fruit juice and berry stains, bare feet running across the dry grass, my mother chasing after them as they shouted and giggled.
“Let’s roll down the hill!” Abby stretched out on the mild slope of the lawn, flopping over and over again as she rolled away from the house. Her sister came after, a blond ponytail that whipped around and around. Then my mother, my stern and cynical mother, followed, rolling and rolling until she sat up, dizzy, with dry grass in her hair, smiling, laughing. I had never seen her like this before.
That was the moment it all melted away: my resistance to this move, fears about what might happen, discomfort at the idea of my mother living so close.
As she had with my brother and me years before, my mother wanted to give her granddaughters a garden. It was as simple as that.