WE ALL SAW DIFFERENT things when we looked at the garden. My mother saw the ability to grow food—a place for her grandchildren to run wild, an insurance policy if times got hard. The house was big; the orchard would provide. Having such a garden was about as self-sufficient as one could be in the city. If the worst came to pass, we might all be able to live on apples and kale.
The girls saw play. They saw hills to roll down and pears to pick and the loft of a cottage to climb into. They saw places to hide and seek, berries to gobble, and a sprinkler to run through on hot summer days.
My brother saw obligation. He saw work. “That’s a lot of lawn I’m going to have to mow,” he said the first time he saw the garden.
My sister-in-law saw leisure. She saw relaxation. “With a yard this big, you could put in a swimming pool,” she told my mother. “Wouldn’t that be great?”
I saw those things, but I saw something more. I saw possibility.
I hoped this would be a place to bring us together. I saw long Sunday dinners at an outdoor table, churning ice cream together in the summer. I saw us decorating bare winter branches for the birds, with birdseed balls and strings of popcorn, the way my brother and I had when we were kids.
I saw the possibility of us being more to each other, of growing together. I saw a place for us to become a family.
I just wasn’t sure how to get there from here. Growing vegetables I understood, but how do you grow a family?
“Why do you think you get along so well?” I once asked my friend Paul’s sister. I was making a study of families, trying to see what held them together. My friend Paul’s family was high on my list.
Paul is one of three kids. There are two parents, and though I am sure they have their moments, they tease each other and laugh and generally seem to get along. The kids spend time together even without the parents, even when it’s not a national holiday or family birthday, even without a guilt trip. Paul likes to hang out with his mom and dad. They genuinely enjoy each other’s company.
Other people enjoy their company as well. The door is often opened to friends. I’ve spent Christmas with them, Easter, the Fourth of July. Paul’s dad will make you a drink, and his mom will chat with you about this and that, and before you know it, everyone is sitting in the backyard laughing. Entire afternoons pass with a few good jokes and a lot of gab.
Paul’s sister Michelle thought for a moment before answering my question, but not for long.
“It all goes back to when Paul was in his coma,” she said. “We realized how easy it would be to lose him and decided not to sweat the small stuff. Life is too short.”
She was referring to the day after Thanksgiving, many years ago, when fifteen-year-old Paul and his friends went running down the mountain we both grew up at the base of, a wild and beautiful place. They called it bush crashing—jumping off outcroppings, barreling down meadows, skidding through trees, letting out the pent-up energy of teen boys. A little bit of danger, a whole lot of fun.
At one point Paul jumped off a cornice and landed wrong. His legs buckled beneath him, both ankles broken, and he began to roll down a hill that got steeper and steeper. His body gathered momentum with each revolution, faster and faster, until the force flung him off a cliff and he landed in a rocky creek bed.
His friends raced to where his body lay. They were both trained Boy Scouts. One ran to the fire station in a nearby town to get help. The other stayed behind, ripping up his jeans to make splints and bandages, watching over Paul and waiting for grown-ups to come. They got him to the hospital in what is called the golden hour—the short period of time after a brain injury before the swelling has done too much damage.
At the hospital, doctors put Paul in a medically induced coma. There was talk he might not make it, that he might be mentally compromised. The family was terrified. The hair on Paul’s father’s head turned gray overnight.
The doctors had a hard time bringing Paul out of the coma. For two weeks his life hung in the balance. Prayer vigils were held at his school and in church. Catholic relics were brought to his hospital room in hopes of a miracle. Then, one day, with his sister sitting by his hospital bed, Paul opened his eyes. From there he made a stunning recovery, returning home in time for Christmas.
“Once we had him back,” Michelle said, “we promised not to screw it up.”
When I ask Paul, he agrees. “We were falling apart,” he says, “always fighting—we’d even started family counseling. We had one session before the accident. But a crisis puts things in perspective. After that we were tight.”
Would it take something like that to bring my family together?
When we were growing up, people often assumed my brother and I were twins. We were both lanky, with a coltish look and cowlicks that sent our wispy blond hair in odd directions. We had the same big eyes we hadn’t yet grown into. In the early years, it was clear he was younger, but as our size difference evened out, people often asked if we were just siblings or perhaps actually twins.
“No,” I would reply, outraged. “I’m two and a half years older!”
It wasn’t the two and a half years that made the difference, though. We might have looked alike, but we had been born into different worlds. I was the daughter of two parents, planned and anticipated. Two and a half years later, my brother was born into a family in shambles, an uncertain future. He had only one parent—and not even all of her.
And he had me: a sister, not much older, who quickly became his second mother. I was his greatest protector and his biggest bully but never his friend.
I don’t remember the moment I first saw my brother. I remember drawing rainbows on construction paper with a babysitter the day my mother was in the hospital having the baby. It is perhaps my earliest memory. The crude lines, the tacky feeling of the wax crayons, the sunlight on our deck that May morning. Beyond that there is nothing.
I don’t know how my mother found that house, or how she paid for it, or who hung the swing from the eaves so it dangled over the deck, but we have pictures of me swinging in it not long after my brother was born. In the photos he is wrapped in a blanket that had been knitted for me by my father’s mother. Two and a half years later she was dead, my father was gone, and there was no communication or support for us from him or his family.
When I speak of my childhood, I often say we grew up like wild wolves. It is at once a joke and not a joke. How does one explain the collision of needs, anger, deprivation, desire, resentment, and hungry love that all came crashing together in that small house in the country? How does one tell of a mother who had never been mothered, a father who wasn’t even a memory, and two children who learned to adapt at all costs? It is a story hard and horrid: We were each our best and worst selves.
Had there been money, community, family—had there been religion, even—it might have been easier. But none of that existed for us. We were on our own, growling and wrestling and marking our territory.
People who knew us then—neighbors, other parents at our school—will tell you that, individually, my brother and I were the most pleasant children. We minded our manners and offered to set and clear the table. We helped with dishes without being asked. They were delighted to have us for sleepovers and invited us on their family vacations; their own children behaved better when we were around.
The dark side of that shiny penny is the way we were with each other, something most people never saw. Some families bind together to survive difficult times—forming a solid unit to defend against what is hard and hopeless. We were not like that. I was hungry for approval and attention and looked outward, not inward. Perhaps I could tell, even then, that the center wouldn’t hold. I leaned toward other people; I tried to be what they wanted of me; that was how I got fed. My brother was competition for resources scarce or nonexistent.
“You were so mean to your brother,” my mother often says—as if a two-year-old had charge of her emotions. My brother arrived only months after my father left, taking up what little was left of my mother’s attention and making me responsible in ways for which I was not prepared. When I took a blanket to cover up the baby, I covered his head as well, as if I could make him disappear entirely.
If I had been older, perhaps I could have done better, been a bigger person. Perhaps then my brother and I would have been on the same team. But I was two when he was born, and my needs were stronger than my maturity. They were an icy cold creature that clawed at me from the inside.
And yet my mother’s words haunt me, they sting. The distance my brother keeps, his disinclination toward our family—it feels as though it is my fault. I sometimes wonder if I should apologize to him, if I should tell him how sorry I am for failing him.
My hands were just too small to hold the pieces together.
There was no expectation for my brother to be part of the garden. He could have been, if he wanted—our mother would have been overjoyed. But he was busy with work and his own family and had never shown any interest in digging or weeding. We had both run wild in our childhood garden, plucking asparagus from the dirt to eat raw, climbing trees to pick the new apples that tasted sweet and clean, but my brother felt no need to coax food from the soil.
A good weekend for him was spent with his wife and children on their new boat, or swimming at the country club. My brother worked in high tech and was a natty dresser. He didn’t want to get his hands dirty.
My mother made him promise to mow the lawn a few times a year and he reluctantly agreed, but it would be an obligation to him, a resentment perhaps, never a pleasure. We were of the same family, but never on the same team.
His wife did like to garden. In fact she loved it. When I first met my sister-in-law, she was the only person I knew who was my age and interested in growing things. Her knowledge of flower names was impressive.
It was from her that I learned—after years of reading the name in books—what a primrose looked like. I expected such a romantic name to be attached to a more impressive flower and was disappointed to find primroses sturdy and pedestrian, cheerful but uninspiring. I promptly decided to forget this newfound knowledge.
Like my mother, my sister-in-law used the proper names for plants. This too I found disappointing. Why call it Datura when you could call it angel’s-trumpet or moonflower? I never liked it when accuracy got in the way of romanticism, and the proper names were so often dull.
I suspected I would never make a proper gardener, because the first thought I had when my sister-in-law mentioned the hedge plant Sarcococca was: There has got to be a better name for that.
Despite its unfortunate name, Sarcococca became a favorite of mine (it is also, happily, called sweet box). It was one of those precious plants to the Northwest gardener: the rare few that bloom in winter, a small and select club. Seattle winters are so long and gray, anything to lift the spirits feels like unexpected grace.
One day a few years earlier, my sister-in-law and I had been taking a walk with the girls when I stopped in my tracks. “What is that smell?”
It was my first winter in Seattle. I was back from San Francisco, trying to see if I could hack the dark and rainy season, trying to see what there was for me in this unexpected city, trying to decide if I should take it seriously. I wasn’t sure.
I was startled to see how much had changed in the few months I had been away. The leafy green I had come to love that summer was gone, the skies were low and overcast, the niecelets had sprouted in my absence. The baby, who had been crawling only three months before, was now toddling on unsteady legs, trying to keep up with her sister.
As I stood with my sister-in-law, watching my young niece bobble unevenly down the sidewalk, I smelled a scent entirely new to me.
“What is that?” I asked her. “Do you smell it? It’s lovely.”
She looked back to where I had stopped, and a smile appeared on her face.
“Winter-blooming Daphne,” she said. “It’s one of my favorites, but so expensive.” She pointed to tiny pinkish flowers on a low shrub I hadn’t noticed. The leaves were green but edged ever so slightly with white, and the whole thing looked unremarkable. I never would have chosen it for a garden—but, oh, the smell. It was like citrus blooms and jasmine and tuberoses all tumbled together. Heavenly.
We stood together there for a moment, breathing in as we watched the girls walk away from us with increasingly sturdy strides, and I felt it in my chest—the exquisitely painful passage of time, how it can be both beautiful and gutting.
I wanted to call them back, to reverse the clock, to somehow make up for the few months I had been away. Their progress left me amazed, both exhilarated and helpless at the days that had slipped through my hands. I wanted to tell them, Don’t grow up so soon.
Instead I breathed the flower scent deeply and tried to fix the moment in my memory: the day the girls walked into their own world.
It wasn’t until that first winter in my mother’s garden that I noticed it, hidden amid the careful planting of the formal front yard. There, between the Japanese pines and maples and ornamental quince, was the largest winter-blooming Daphne I had ever seen. As if it had been selected and placed there especially for us.
All through the bleakness of my mother’s first winter in Seattle, all through February, March, and April, I clipped tiny sprigs of Daphne to bring home with me. Set in water on a sunny windowsill, they opened and perfumed my house: this unremarkable flower with the intoxicating scent. Unexpected sweetness in the midst of gray days.
It might have seemed natural for my sister-in-law to join us in the garden, but it never worked out that way. Her passion lay in flowers, not food. Her own yard was neat and orderly, with hedges and borders and blooming vines. It was a place of relaxation and recreation, not of productivity. The branches of the neighbor’s plum tree that arched slightly over her fence irritated her when they dropped their soft fruit on her stone path. She did not see it the way my mother did. Perhaps she had never been hungry enough.
Instead we fell into a pattern: my sister-in-law dropping off the girls at my mother’s house when she wanted some free time. Occasionally I joined them, though usually by coincidence rather than plan. One day I came to do some gardening, and when I walked through the wooden gate, I stopped in my tracks, stunned by what I saw before me.
Blankets were spread on the sloping lawn, books and plates of fruit scattered about. Abby and Cate were wearing flowered dresses from a closet my mother kept stocked with dress-up outfits. Japanese paper umbrellas in bright colors lay blown around the grass. It looked like a graceful scene of bucolic outdoor recreation, an impressionist painting come to life. I was dumbstruck by the beauty, in an aching, wistful way.
Was this scene of wonder and delight my mother’s doing?
To me my mother was all necessity and catastrophe; I hadn’t imagined she could extend to grace. Maybe it was a fluke. Maybe I had been wrong about her—or maybe this part of her had just been buried so long by worry and fear.
We planted sunflowers that day, digging small holes and showing the girls how to drop in the large gray seeds and mound the earth back in place, to press down gently and water them well. We didn’t know that, over the next few days, crows would dig up all the seeds and in the end not a single one would sprout or bloom. It didn’t matter. It felt like something else was being planted that day, something that would grow in the girls for the rest of their lives.
When my sister-in-law came to pick them up, she sat on the grass in the sunshine and chatted a bit, as the girls changed back into their regular clothes. She told us what she had bought that day, her plans for the weekend, how happy she was to have such nice weather. But she never picked up a trowel or garden gloves. Even though the lawn she sat on was marred with dandelions, even though there was more than enough work to go around, she never jumped in.
Maybe we didn’t make room for her; maybe we never invited her in. Maybe we should have. But then again, she never offered. It’s hard to know where the lines are drawn.
Abby had been almost one when my mother left Seattle the first time, after a year of trying to live close to my brother and his new family. After she left she visited frequently, but still she worried her granddaughter wouldn’t remember her, that she might die without Abby knowing who she was. When Cate was born, that fear doubled.
This may sound extreme or paranoid, but my mother has only a single memory of her own mother. Everything they shared in the first three years of her life—hugs and lullabies and scraped knees and first teeth and bath time—is lost to the limitations of a child’s mind and a death come too soon. My mother didn’t want history to repeat itself.
“If I die before they remember me,” she often asked in those days, “will you tell them how much I loved them?”
“Of course I will.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
In those days, when my mother visited Seattle to see her grandchildren, she brought books. On the inside cover she always inscribed the same message. It was what she told the girls on the phone from California, whenever they could be persuaded to talk to her: Grandma loves you all the time.
As the girls grew, they learned to parrot my mother, they said it together at the end of phone conversations or when she was leaving after a visit. Their high, chirpy voices blended with her own low tones to make a chant, a chorus, a call to arms. She would start and they would join in: “Grandma loves you all the time.”
They thought it was a game, a joke. Only I knew the sad, scared place it came from. Only I knew what it really meant: a little girl with a single memory of her own mother. A little girl who did not remember ever being loved.
Even if she is not here, even when you cannot see her, even if she dies, even if you don’t remember her: Grandma loves you all the time.
For a number of years, when my brother and I were young, we drove every summer from our home in California to the mountains of Colorado. There was a graduate school just starting up in Boulder; my mother was teaching there.
Mostly what I remember is the drive: long and unending, my brother and me in the back of my mom’s old Volvo. We ate plums along the way, throwing the pits out the almond-shaped rear windows that were held open by a funny little hinge. Our pits made tracks of slime on the outside of the car that stayed there until someone washed them off in Colorado three days later.
We sang in the car too. Once we were out of radio range, we sang songs our mother taught us or that we knew from school. We got so good we could sing three-part rounds, each person staggering their start time and going around and around and around until we were dizzy with the music, our high voices combining sweetly, gracefully. You might have thought there were angels singing in the backseat.
We were angels and we were devils. We sang and we fought. There was a line down the center of the backseat and no wartime border was ever so well defended. The mere hint of a finger straying over the line was grounds for outright attack or wailing.
“Moooommmmm, he’s on my side!”
But even devils get tired. Eventually my brother grew sleepy. When he did he snuggled up to me, and I let him, temporarily suspending the rules of engagement and allowing him room on my side of the car.
“Make your hands like Mommy,” he said, and I gently stroked his hair until he fell asleep. I sat as still as I could as my mother drove late into the night and my brother slept, his golden head in my lap, and together we crossed the desert plains of Nevada and climbed high into the dark mountains, up the spine of a continent and down the other side.
It was my brother who first suggested I move to Seattle. I was still living in Japan at the time, but back for a visit. I had one year left on my contract, and I was thinking about my options. That summer I visited friends in Colorado and Washington, D.C., as well as San Francisco. Everywhere I went I wondered: Could this be my next home?
The one place I never considered was Seattle. I stopped there only to visit my brother—and because it was partway between my mother’s house near San Francisco and the island in Canada where she was teaching for the summer.
We hadn’t been close growing up. The teen years in particular had been a catfight. Though perhaps it was a catfight all along. I have a scar on my forehead from a spoon my brother threw at me in a fit of childhood anger. It split the skin, and when our mother heard the screams and came running, she found blood coursing down my face. I was eight, he was six; we had only been trying to play cards.
In the year or two before I left Japan, however, there had been a softening, perhaps a warming. My friend Paul had a little to do with it. We were both working in Japan, and when I heard about the great time he’d had when his sister visited him, I blurted out, almost without thinking, “I want my brother to come visit me.”
“Invite him,” Paul said. And he told me exactly what to say when I called my brother, out of the blue, to ask him to visit me on the other side of the world.
“I’m gonna make you an offer you can’t refuse.”
My brother did come—our mother quickly offering to pay for his ticket. That trip felt like the beginning of our adult relationship, no longer competing for scarce resources. He met my friends, won over local students (“Leo! Leo!” they cried, thinking he looked like Leonardo DiCaprio). He and Paul both teased me, each of them knowing all too well what buttons to press. Suddenly it felt like I had two brothers.
Still, when he suggested I consider Seattle on my list of possibilities, it surprised me. I thought the reason he had gone off to college and never come home was a desire for distance from family. I thought we were on the same page about that. I had moved to Europe and then to Asia. Distance was a game I was good at.
“Would you want me here?”
“I don’t think we’d hang out all the time,” he said, a bit defensively. “We’d have our own friends—but I think you’d like it here.”
In high school my brother had surpassed me. Somehow this small child I used to take care of had picked up a social rhythm I couldn’t quite grasp. He was funny, popular, a quick wit with sly humor. I was always a beat or two off, standing alone in the cold.
He could have brought me into this circle, but he didn’t. He made fun of me; he shut me out. Perhaps he learned it from me. Hadn’t I been first to sell him out?
“Nobody likes you,” my brother taunted. It wasn’t true, but part of me, the most scared and tender part, feared that it was. That my brother could somehow see through me in a way other people couldn’t. That he knew what I really was: a fraud, a failure, destined to be a social outcast. It was years before I realized he wasn’t right.
But sometimes my brother surprised me. A few years after he moved to Seattle, I stayed with him on my way down from Canada. I would be arriving late and leaving early and couldn’t even tell him for sure when I would show up—ferry lines and border crossings take time. When I arrived, late and tired, I found he had gone across town to my favorite restaurant and picked up an order of the soup that he knew I liked. When I thanked him profusely he shrugged it off, but in those moments I could see the little blond boy who had fallen asleep with his head in my lap.
Now, nearly a decade later, I asked my brother if he was okay with having me in Seattle. I asked several times, just to be clear. It’s one thing to have your sister in your city for the summer, babysitting your kids and dropping off dinner. It’s another thing to be stuck with her there, possibly forever.
“You can do whatever you want,” he said several times. “It’s fine with me.”
By then I had some friends in Seattle. I knew my way around. But still. Living in the same city would connect us in ways we never had been as adults. At the time our mother still lived in California and traveled often. If something happened to me, he would be the only relative in proximity. Besides my mother, he was the only family I had in all the world.
This change in geography would force us to be more to each other than ever before. Perhaps that is what I should have asked about. Perhaps I should have spelled it out for him.
Are you prepared to be my family?
Was he willing to take that on? Did I trust him enough to let him?
The first winter I spent in Seattle, I got sick. It started on a Saturday when I had driven north of the city to a large thrift sale. I wandered through buildings filled with everything from sporting equipment to antiques but left early, feeling sick. On my way home, I called my brother and sister-in-law to report on the sale. They had been undecided about making the trek.
“There’s good stuff,” I told him, “but I feel awful. I have a fever. I’m going back to bed.”
“Sorry to hear that,” he said. “I’ll give a call later to check on you.”
He did call to check on me—but not until Tuesday. By then I had spent days in a blazing fugue, feverish and sicker than I had ever been. My sole memory of that weekend is getting out of bed to go to the bathroom and collapsing on the floor, the rough feel of carpet under my cheek. I remember trying to crawl across the room. I remember wondering if I might die there. I woke two days later, in bed, spent and shaken, the sheets twisted around my legs.
By the time my brother called, I was angry. He was the only one who knew I was sick, knew I was alone. How could he have not checked on me? Was I not more important than a trip to Home Depot—or whatever he had been doing that weekend?
But mostly I was scared. I could have died there. Alone.
I was no stranger to being sick on my own. By that point I had been sick all over the world. In my student apartment in Vienna, my roommate had translated the dosage instructions on my medicine and made me garlic soup. In Thailand, kind guesthouse owners took my temperature and offered food from their own kitchen. In China, fellow travelers I had met only the day before ignored my protests and went out to buy soft tofu for me. They told me it was the only thing to eat after food poisoning.
I had been cared for more graciously by strangers than I had by my own brother.
Even in San Francisco I had been better off. There was Chinese takeout across the street. I knew my neighbors; our buildings adjoined. If I were truly dying, I could pound on the floor, and eventually J.L. would come to investigate. I could shout across the air shaft, and George would likely hear, or Mark and Chris upstairs. We might not have been friends, but our lives were unfolding in close proximity. I knew they would help if I needed it.
In San Francisco I had resources. I knew how to protect myself. But in this new city I was stripped bare. The neighborhood I lived in was desired for its proximity to the Arboretum, the university, the bridge that led to technology companies across Lake Washington. The houses were handsome, some stately, but the well-tended blocks were deserted during the day and quiet at night. Everyone had their yard, their space. Money bought isolation as well as privacy.
I could have pounded, I could have shouted, but nobody would have heard. This cold fact left me more scared than I had ever been.
The one person who was supposed to be my family had let me down.
That Tuesday, when my brother finally called, I insisted he come over. When he did—still in his work clothes, checking his phone—I yelled at him. I shouted. We fought as we had not fought since high school. Since the days when we slammed doors and ripped them open with such ferocity that the knob went through the plaster of the wall behind, leaving a round, gaping hole. A tribute to our rough anger with each other.
“Why didn’t you check on me?”
“Why didn’t you tell me how sick you were?”
“I did tell you I was sick. I told you Saturday!”
“Why didn’t you call to tell me you had gotten worse?”
“I was too sick to call.”
Around and around we went, around and around until we were almost dizzy with the accusations. I was angry; he was defensive. He wouldn’t apologize, and I refused to let it drop. Instead I raged. I took the horror of feeling so vulnerable, so unprotected, and I unloaded it on him. Perhaps it was unfair of me—it wasn’t my brother’s fault that I was living alone—but I didn’t care. I needed to make him understand, and he seemed determined not to.
I yelled as I had not yelled in years. I yelled like my mother.
In the end I was crying on the couch, and he had still not relented. He took the abuse, but he would not apologize. To him it was a logic problem. If you had called…If I had known…It’s not my fault.
It came from his head, not from his heart. He never said what I needed to hear:
I am sorry you were all alone. I am sorry I didn’t call. That must have been horrible. It won’t ever happen again, I promise.
He sat there stiffly as I wiped tears and pulled myself together. But still, I couldn’t let it drop. Where was his compassion? How could the little boy whose head I stroked as he slept in my lap be this cold, this unfeeling? Hadn’t I raised him better than this? I tried one last appeal.
“I’m sitting here crying, and you don’t even care? You have daughters now. What if I were Abby—what if she were this upset? Would you not put your arm around her and comfort her?”
“Of course I would,” he said. “But she’s my daughter. You’re just my sister.”
Without much discussion, my mother and I had begun buying presents for the garden. I mentioned I wanted a croquet set, and she found one before I did. I bought a vintage badminton net and rackets when I saw them at a rummage sale. Later I found bocce balls and added those to our growing collection. I didn’t even know how to play bocce.
We were buying things for a life we did not have—some Kennedyesque existence where a boisterous family plays games on a sloping lawn before tromping in for Sunday supper. We had nothing like that.
It reminded me of the first Thanksgiving after my brother and sister-in-law met. They had flown to California to spend the holiday with us in the cabin on the coast my mom rented with friends. It was small and sparsely furnished, awkward for more than two people, but perched on a cliff overlooking the ocean. On a clear day, you could see from San Francisco in the south to Point Reyes in the north, and out to the Farallon Islands far offshore. We fell asleep to the sound of crashing waves and woke to a blazing dawn. If you are the sort of person that my mother is—the sort of person I am—this is worth some discomfort.
The cliff the cabin stood on was mostly wild, but a well-tended lawn lay on the inland side. It belonged to a gray-shingled house with white trim I had always admired. Compared to our tiny cabin, this house looked solid. It looked Cape Cod. I was sure dependable people lived there; none of our wild ways.
That first Thanksgiving with my sister-in-law we walked on the beach, as we always did. For our family the holiday revolved around hanging out together and a long walk. It might be chilly in Northern California in November, but it was always sunny, the dry-grass hills a golden hue.
Walking up from the beach, we saw a touch football game being played on the lawn next to the house on the cliff. The younger members of the family were tossing the ball around while older folks sat on the deck with cocktails; they waved as we walked by. We didn’t know these people, but I longed to be one of them. I longed for the friendly ease they had with each other, the rough-and-tumble team spirit.
Around our table things felt wrong. We often bickered. When my brother was around, he would get sleepy, his way of tuning it out. He seemed to prefer to stay distant from it all.
It’s not that we didn’t want to be a family—we honestly didn’t know how to go about it. We were making it all up as we went along. But it didn’t feel right; it didn’t feel warm. We were awkward and clumsy with each other. Our pieces never quite fit.
It was six years after that Thanksgiving that my mother moved to Seattle and into Orchard House. It still felt like we didn’t fit. It felt like we were failing—both ourselves and each other. But we went through the motions: Maybe we could fake it until it felt real.
That first year in Seattle we gathered in the garden to celebrate my mother’s late-spring birthday. Seventy-three is a big deal, especially for someone who assumed she would die before thirty. I made a menu I hoped would please everyone. There was a frittata with broccoli I knew the kids would eat; a spring salad of endive and avocado, which my brother and sister-in-law like; and a fruit pie instead of cake, because that is what my mother prefers.
The day dawned sunny, unexpectedly warm. The flowers were out—the San Geronimo irises, the deep red tulips my mother loves. The rhododendrons were blooming in pink, white, and purple, a carpet of petals on the lawn.
After we ate everyone tromped outside on the grass, and my mother unveiled her latest gift for the garden: an assortment of Hula-Hoops she had found at thrift stores. I had seen their brightly colored rounds leaned up against the house when I had come that week to garden. “I’ve been practicing,” my mother confided.
The children fell upon them with glee, stepping inside and bringing the plastic hoops waist-high, spinning them and swaying back and forth. Everybody clapped and cheered them on.
“You too, Grandma!” Cate called out.
My mother selected one of the larger hoops and began. My seventy-three-year-old mother, hula-hooping. You could see the dancer she had been in her younger years, graceful, flexible. We all laughed and cheered. Grandma was pretty good.
“Mommy, Daddy, come on!” My sister-in-law and brother joined in, able to do only a few rotations before the hoops fell at their feet. The girls were delighted to see their parents fail at something they found so easy.
“You too, Tea-tea,” they called to me.
“Just a minute,” I said, dashing inside to get my camera.
It was there that I looked out the window and saw it: my family, playing, laughing. My seventy-three-year-old mother and her five-year-old granddaughter were being crowned Hula-Hoop champions among the spring flowers. From a distance I could see what hadn’t been clear at close range: We looked like we were having fun.
We looked like a family. One you might even want to be part of.
Much later, after my brother and sister-in-law had packed up the kids and all gone home, after my mother and I had cleared the birthday dishes and scrubbed the frittata off the inside of her casserole dish, we went outside to clean up the garden. The brightly colored Hula-Hoops and Frisbees were scattered over the lawn.
“So…” I began with some trepidation. “Did you have an okay time?” My mother is not one to mince words. She is not one to pretend. And I would never ask if something had been good. Good is more than I ever hope for with my mother.
“I guess it wasn’t too terrible,” she allowed.
In a world of broken glasses, in the world my mother inhabits, this is almost praise.
I thought back on all the laughter, the spring flowers, the hula-hooping, the girls. I didn’t know what she was waiting for—a personal hallelujah chorus? Couldn’t she just be happy for once? There wasn’t much time left.
“You might want to try enjoying it,” I told her. “This might be as good as it gets.”