AFTER KNOX, MY NEXT friend to come to the garden was Kim. Though we had known each other only a few years, Kim and I had intertwining history. We had attended the same college—years apart—and had both worked in the book industry; we had helped run different literary festivals. It was as if we had been destined to meet all along. It just took me moving to Seattle to seal the deal.
I thought Kim, more than anyone else I knew in Seattle, might be able to understand the potential of the garden, how there was a chance for this to be a magical place. In many ways I was still the young girl who wanted to climb trees and read books and daydream. I had a sense that Kim shared that too. I hoped she could see past the weeds, the cracked patio, the moss growing between the shingles of the cottage roof. I hoped she could see the wonder.
Kim arrived wearing the linen tank top, long shorts, and leather Top-Siders that made up her summer uniform. I met her in the driveway where I’d been weeding, keeping an eye out for her. I wanted to be there when she first saw the garden.
That spring had seen a variety of people come into the garden, mostly workmen. They walked in from the gate, and the scene spread out in front of them: covered patio to the left, high banks of camellias, azaleas, and rhododendrons, and a wide lawn that began to slope down toward the cottage and the patio that stood before it. They’d all had the same reaction, every last one of them.
“Wow, this is a really big yard,” they said at first glance.
Then their eyes would travel further, and they’d realize the cottage was not the end of the yard. The garden was a figure eight, the upper lawn simply half the equation. When they saw there was a field down there with fruit trees and wild grasses, they stopped in their tracks.
“Whoa. This is a really big yard.” There was always a note of awe in their voices. Or was it fear?
Kim was not like the workmen. She was not awed by the garden; she was not scared. Kim was the most competent person I knew. She stood on the edge of the patio at the top of the yard and looked down, past the greenhouse and the cottage to the field and fruit trees beyond.
“Well,” she said briskly. “I can see what you’ve bitten off here.”
We wandered across the lawn, which was turning dry and golden as the summer progressed. I showed her the vegetables, the spot where a semicircular bed of weeds had been cleared to reveal surprise raspberry bushes. As we walked past the cottage, I described the overgrown blackberries. We peered into the greenhouse, which was sprouting tall grasses from its earthen floor.
“This is a lot of work,” Kim said in a businesslike tone. “And your mom is gone all summer?”
“Yep,” I said, looking around. It was always a surprise to see the garden through someone else’s eyes. Kim saw weeding, mowing, berry vines that needed to be cut back.
But as we walked up to the house, past the bank of rhododendrons that reached ten feet high, she peered into the shrubbery, quickly realizing the long, oval leaves concealed space behind them, tunnels and holes in which you could hide.
“You know,” she said slowly, “if I were a kid, I would think this was magical. There are so many places to slip off and read a book or make a fort.” She looked around again, her sharp eye sizing it all up. “Your nieces are going to love it here. What amazing memories you will make for them.”
That was exactly what I was hoping for.
Most of the time the garden didn’t make sense: this huge space, all this work, no one there in the summer to enjoy it. I went over to water and weed several times a week, often staying until dark. On weekends I tried to put in a full day. But then I went home. The garden grew and bloomed and flowered and fruited, all without anyone there to appreciate it.
“You’re doing this all wrong—you realize that?” Knox had told me. “The best part of a garden is after the work is done, kicking back with a drink and enjoying it. You’ve got all the work and none of the enjoyment!”
He was right. I had never sat in the garden at the end of a day and enjoyed my accomplishments. At the end of the day, I was tired and dirty and went home.
I started cutting flowers, something my mother would not have approved of. She preferred them growing on the stem. But with her gone all summer I helped myself to dahlias and hydrangeas. It seemed only fair that I get to take something home with me to enjoy. Otherwise, what was all this work for?
There was food, of course. I carried home baskets of kale and chard each weekend. There were peas in the spring, snappy and sweet, and green beans as summer rolled on. There was lettuce and arugula that needed to be used before it got too hot and the plants bolted, putting out flowers and becoming bitter. My grocery bill shrank, but even that was a toss-up. Was it really worth spending all my free time in the garden just to save twenty dollars a week?
“Why don’t you just have a little P-Patch, shop at the farmers’ market, and have your weekends free?” Sarah asked, when it became clear that the garden was taking over my life. I sometimes wondered the same.
The garden was lovely, of course. In the summer evenings, when the light slanted golden and the dahlias that had been planted all those years ago glowed and the breeze rustled through the feathery cilantro that had gone to seed, I again felt what I had experienced at Picardo, a feeling that can only be described as peace. But then I loaded up my baskets and went home, and the garden continued on without anyone there to appreciate it.
The only time the garden made sense was Wednesdays. That was the day the niecelets came to play.
I’d hear them even before they came running around the side of the house, tearing through the gate into the garden. “Tea-tea! Tea-tea!”
Usually one was trying to outrace the other, to be first to launch herself at me—sometimes into my arms, sometimes just at my knees. At five and six years old, they were still young enough to want to be cuddled, picked up, tossed about.
As Cate came barreling toward me, I reached out and launched her into the air, long, skinny limbs flying in all directions. I caught her and tickled her as she wriggled and shrieked with laughter, the sound of it cascading down the sloping hill.
“My turn next! My turn next!” Abby jumped up and down in anticipation.
Before I put Cate down, I kissed the top of her sun-bleached head and breathed deep the scent of her. She smelled like swimming pools, sunscreen, fresh towels, a childhood so free of cares it brought sudden tears to my eyes.
“You smell just like summer,” I said. She giggled, and I turned to her sister. More shrieks, more laughter, another kiss on the head.
Their first question was always the same: “What are we going to do today?”
I answered with a question of my own: “What do you think is ripe?”
Early in the summer it was raspberries. We waded deep into the canes with plastic containers, picking the small ruby thimbles that crushed between our fingers with too much pressure.
“Your daddy and I picked raspberries like these when we were your age,” I told them, as the sun beat down on our backs.
“Really?” they said, sounding surprised. “He never told us that.”
“Does he tell you about how things were when we were little?”
“Not really.”
The niecelets were full of stories of their mother’s family—of great-grandfather John who played the violin, of the great-grandmother everyone called Hellcat, even to her face. Their great-great-grandmother Jocabed had been the youngest of twenty-one children.
Stories of our side of the family didn’t seem to exist, unless I told them. I wondered whether this was because my brother was at work all day or whether he didn’t want to talk about our early years, in the same way survivors sometimes do not want to revisit their past.
“We lived in a house in the country,” I told the girls as soft red berries plunked in our containers or were poked into mouths. “We had a small creek that dried up in the summer but became so big with the winter rains that sometimes it flooded. Grandma planted a garden for us, and there were apple trees you could climb and stay up there all afternoon reading a book. If you got hungry, you just picked an apple to eat.”
“That’s cool,” said Cate.
“I liked the apple trees because your daddy was too little to climb, so I could go up there and be all by myself.”
Abby giggled. As an oldest child, she knew what it was like to long for solitude.
“I have an idea,” said Cate. “Let’s go up in the loft of the cottage and tell secrets.” The final words were drawn out as if they were something dramatic.
So we ran off, abandoning our berry containers awhile. We’d come back to them later in the day. We’d come back to them later in the season, when there would be blueberries and blackberries, each in turn. The summer stretched out in front of us, endless and sweet. Now was the time to tell secrets.
As we climbed the wooden ladder in the cottage and curled up under the sloping eaves, I smiled. I had imagined the girls doing this the day my mother and I came to steal berries in the garden, long before the house was hers. I imagined the cottage their clubhouse, a special members-only password and a KEEP OUT sign posted on the door. I liked to think of them trading secrets like currency, whispered confidences large and small, forgotten and remembered.
I just hadn’t imagined I would be there with them, that I would be invited in. I never imagined we would have our own special club of three.
When Abby was born, I had wondered how I was going to be a good aunt to her, living so far away. My brother was busy with work, and my sister-in-law never got on the phone to talk. How was I going to know this child, this miraculous thing that had entered our lives?
“Don’t worry about it,” my friend Michelle said. “These days kids have email by the time they’re eight.” Her own niece and nephew lived on the other side of the country. They emailed regularly, she said.
But eight years was a long way off. What was I going to do until then?
We had all gathered in Seattle for Thanksgiving the first year of Abby’s life. I brought her a picture book about the holiday and made sure to inscribe my name on the cover page, so when she was older she would know I had been there. She was only ten months old, not quite walking. My sister-in-law’s parents had visited recently and taken pictures using a camera flash, which Abby did not like. Every time I pulled out my camera, she frowned at me. I went home with dozens of photos of this small blond child giving me the stink eye.
By the next Thanksgiving, Cate had been born—four months old with a mohawk that stuck straight up; we called her the cockatiel. Abby was almost two years old, walking and talking. We went to the park and scuffed in the leaves, and when my sister-in-law got sick the weekend after Thanksgiving, I extended my visit to help with the kids.
When opportunity came the following spring to spend some time in Seattle, I took it. I fully intended to return to San Francisco after the summer. By then the girls would have baseline knowledge of who I was. “I don’t want to be the semi-stranger who shows up each year for Thanksgiving,” I told my friends.
What I hadn’t expected was that I would fall in love with my nieces. I’d spent time with children my whole life; I started babysitting at age eight. I loved all the children I had cared for, but not the way I loved my nieces.
That first summer in Seattle I took care of each of the girls one day a week—Cate on Wednesday, Abby on Friday—while their mother took the other child to a toddler gym class. I worked on the weekends to make up for the time. It was worth it.
Together we went to the park, to the wading pool. We picked berries, and each Wednesday Cate and I waited for the garbage truck, the highlight of her week. We read books and played puzzles, and Abby and I visited a farm, where she fell in love with a purple cabbage and insisted on holding it in her lap the entire drive home. I came home those days tired but filled up in a way I couldn’t quite put words to. It was as if I had been thirsty a long time and not known it.
One day, that first summer I was in Seattle, Abby and I were driving back to the house where I was living. It was chilly that morning, and she was wearing a puffy white jacket with embroidery on it, sitting in her car seat. As we drove down Roosevelt, headed for the University Bridge and the ship canal, her little voice piped up from the backseat.
“Tea-tea.”
“Yes?” I looked at her in the rearview mirror: tiny in her jacket, wispy blond hair held away from her face.
“Tea-tea,” she said, looking out the window at the traffic alongside us, “I love you all the time.”
At that moment my heart cracked open; it has never gone back to being the same again.
Late that first summer, my brother and sister-in-law took the girls to the East Coast to visit her family and asked if I would drive them to the airport. We all piled into their car, everyone in high spirits. When we arrived at the airport, the girls grabbed their tiny roller bags with their baby dolls strapped to the outside and nearly ran into the terminal, so excited were they for the trip. My sister-in-law raced after the girls; my brother was juggling luggage and travel seats for the kids. I waved to them all and got in the car to drive home.
It wasn’t until I pulled away from the curb that it hit me: What if something happens to them? What if the plane crashes?
Suddenly I was wiping away tears, unable to see the road ahead of me, so overwhelmed I took the wrong lane and drove into the parking garage rather than onto the freeway. I sat there in the dark a few minutes, bent over the steering wheel of my sister-in-law’s huge and unfamiliar SUV, weeping, terrified at the idea of losing those girls, shocked at the vulnerability of loving them so much.
So this is what it feels like to not be able to call your heart your own.
“Tea-tea, look what I found!” Abby came running from the back field, holding something in her hands, Cate hot at her heels.
“What is it?” I knelt down to see whatever small wonder she wanted to share with me. She stopped running and came close, until we were face-to-face; then she threw the contents of her hands high in the air. Dry grass seed showered down on me as she and Cate erupted in giggles.
“You stinker!” I said, shaking the grass seed out of my hair but smiling along with them.
I was surprised to hear this phrase come out of my mouth. My grandfather had called me stinker when I was young, but he had been dead twenty years. When I was a child, he used to visit us from his home in Florida, but when he died more than a decade later, I hadn’t seen him in years.
Stinker was a reference to my nature, a spiritedness he neither understood nor could control. It was equal parts endearment and scolding. Now, thirty years later, I was delighted to find my nieces were stinkers as well. The family mischievousness was in good hands for another generation.
“You guys want to see the hammock I put up?” They looked at me curiously.
“What is a hammock?”
“Follow me and I’ll show you.”
I had strung the hammock under the rhododendrons, stunned that a bush could grow big and sturdy enough. Ours towered over the garden, more than ten feet high. The hammock was hidden from view by those leaves Kim had realized served as a screen. The girls followed me to where the faded striped fabric made a long sling, and I showed them how to scramble in and swing back and forth.
“Push us, Tea-tea. Push us harder!” Their skinny legs went sprawling out of the hammock as I pushed them back and forth, and they laughed in delight; the sound washed over me like unexpected summer rain, the sort you hold your face up to drink in.
“You’re really Weavers now,” I told them. “We love our hammocks in this family.”
We’d always had a hammock, ever since I could remember. I used to crawl in and wrap myself up as if I were in a cocoon, weaving my small fingers into the strings to keep it closed. My brother did the same, and I pushed him, making up a game where I twisted the cocoon so many times it would spin to unravel, and my brother would emerge dizzy and laughing, begging me to do it again.
There was never anyone to push me when I was young—my brother was unreliable in the quid pro quo department—but I figured out how to rig up one of the straight rakes from the garden to help me. I buried the tines in the dirt and leaned the handle up against the hammock at a perpendicular angle. Then, as I lay there reading, I could push against the handle, and, as a result, the hammock would rock back and forth. I remember feeling pleased at my invention, at having solved this small problem. There was no one to help, but I could help myself.
“Push us, Tea-tea,” my nieces cried. “Push us harder.”
And so I did, feeling glad to be there. To push them, to catch them; these children would need no rake. It felt like a joy I had not known before, a gift for all of us.
It felt like progress.
I began to plan our days in the garden, to think of things the girls would like, fun ways to share with them what I thought important: nature, adventurousness, imagination, wonder. There were days when we lay in the tall grass of the back meadow and looked for shapes in the lacy clouds that floated overhead: a boat, a rabbit, a snake. Studies say the average American child spends only minutes outside each day. I was glad to know that was not true of these two.
Sometimes I intentionally let them do nothing. They always gravitated to the meadow, running their hands through the tall grass collecting dried seed, as dreamy and self-occupied as I had been growing up in the country. In the rush of their own busy lives of soccer, swimming, tennis, choir, I was glad they had time to wander and daydream.
Other days we watered the garden, the girls each with her own small watering can. On hot days I set up the sprinkler, and they ran through, the droplets sparkling and catching light as I marveled at their pure joy from the simplest thing.
Years ago a high school teacher had quoted John Ciardi to our class—“Man is what he does with his attention”—and the idea had stayed with me ever since. What we spend our time and energy on is who we are, what is important to us. I chose to give my attention to these girls, to be there for them, to share my version of what was valuable in life.
One day I discovered a secret space underneath the large azalea bush perfect for hiding. We’ll read here, I thought when I saw it. It will be our bower.
The Victorian novels I’d devoured as a child always had people reading books in garden bowers. That week, when the girls were coming to play, I spread a soft blanket under the bush and put one of my favorite books there: The Secret Garden.
“Look at this perfect hiding spot,” I told them when we had eaten our fill of berries and swung from the hammock and climbed the trees and the long afternoon shadows were beginning to slant across the grass of the garden. “Why don’t we read a book? I have one you might like.”
“It’s a little den,” said Abby, as charmed by the setting as I was.
“Can I sit in your lap?” Cate was always fast to claim that spot.
“Of course you can.” We ducked our heads and cozied up on the blanket with Cate on my lap and Abby snuggled to my right, ready to turn the pages, and I began to read the familiar lines about Mary, who was born in India, a peculiar girl with a yellow complexion and sour nature.
“Bugs,” Abby shrieked. “There are bugs in here!” She leapt to her feet, crashing through the bushes and onto the lawn, trying to get away from the small gnat that had crawled onto our blanket.
Cate jumped from my lap and followed. “I hate bugs. Get them away from me.”
I sighed and followed them. Nowhere in all of those lovely Victorian novels did anyone mention bower bugs.
Late in the summer, when the grass had dried to a crunchy yellow and the garden was festooned with blackberries, the girls and I had a campout. It was almost fall, one of the last weekends of warmth and sunshine we would have. Before the end of the summer, there was one more thing I wanted us to do.
We pitched a tent on the dry grass, lugged sleeping pads and bags, and I gave them each their own flashlight—one shaped like a ladybug, the other like a bumblebee. They were in high spirits with the excitement of sleeping outside, something they had never done. They had pitched the tent in their living room, but this was the real thing.
After dinner we roasted marshmallows, building a small fire in a galvanized metal tub for lack of a proper fire pit. The girls ran off to find sticks, threading their marshmallows and holding them over the fire. They had made s’mores before.
“Tea-tea, why does the fire turn into mosquitoes?” Cate asked.
“What do you mean?”
“See, the fire goes up and turns into bugs.” She pointed to the flames, and I saw what she meant. Tiny bits of ash floated up from the fire and into the shadows. For a moment, as they circled lazily on the updraft, the small flakes did indeed look like roving mosquitoes. Then they disappeared into the darkness, to descend far outside our small circle of light.
In that moment I realized: These kids did not know fire.
They had roasted marshmallows before, but over a gas insert in the patio table my brother and sister-in-law had in their backyard. They watched movies in front of a gas fireplace turned on by a switch. When our small campfire blew smoke in their faces, they didn’t know why their eyes were stinging. What had been an integral part of my life growing up in a country house heated by a wood-burning stove, was something entirely foreign to them.
How is it possible not to know fire? This is what has sustained our species—allowed us to cook enough calories to develop larger brains, helped us build the tools we needed to survive. And yet, children today were growing up with no knowledge of this elemental substance. Perhaps there were those who saw this as progress; to me it seemed dangerous.
“This is smoke,” I told the girls. “This is ash. This is what happens when you burn wood. This is important.”
Later that night we snuggled into sleeping bags. It was the peak of the Perseid meteor showers, and I left the rain cover off the tent so we could see the night sky. Every August the earth passes the orbital path of a far-off comet. When the debris of this comet enters the atmosphere, the result is a burst of meteor activity: thousands upon thousands of shooting stars.
I had grown up watching the Perseids at summer camp in the mountains of California. One night we had lain in our sleeping bags in a wide-open meadow and counted thirty-two shooting stars before we finally fell asleep. I wanted the girls to know this wonder, the sight of stars streaking across a dark night sky.
Abby fell asleep immediately, curling up in a tight ball, but Cate and I lay there, eyes open, looking for the trail of light that might signify a meteor.
Suddenly there was flash and motion when before there had been none. “Look, Cate! Do you see it?”
“I see it, Tea-tea. I see it!” She wriggled closer in delight, and I wrapped my arms around her, smelling the campfire smoke in her hair. Soon there was another, and another. We counted four before we dozed off, the lateness of the evening finally overcoming us both.
But before she fell asleep entirely, I heard Cate’s voice from deep inside her sleeping bag, lazy and slow, almost a whisper.
“Tea-tea. You’re my best friend who is a grown-up.”
There it was—just as I had hoped, just as Kim had said it would be.
Magic.