IT WAS A LONG winter of kale and potatoes and onions before we made our way back to the garden. Winter often felt endless in Seattle—day after day of dark gray, the ground soggy, the days short, the garden on hiatus. When local gardeners said, “We’re so lucky to be able to grow year-round in the Northwest,” I wanted to laugh. Lucky compared to where? Alaska?
The truth is, not much grows in the winter in Seattle, not even the grass. It’s as if the persistent winter drizzle pushes it down. You can keep some kale plants going until spring, perhaps a bit of chard if the frosts aren’t too hard and it doesn’t snow much. If you’ve planted your winter vegetables early enough, you may have carrots or beets to tide you over. The collards will continue to produce, at a much slower speed, and you might be able to coax along a cabbage or two, but unless you have a greenhouse, there’s not much going on.
I remember a farmers’ market stand I once saw in Seattle in March. The farm itself is large, well established, and respected. From late spring into winter, their stand bursts with gorgeous vegetables and bags of grain, but in March that year, all they had to sell were subscriptions to their summer produce box and a huge pile of parsley. That was it: nothing but parsley.
Don’t believe what they say: Late winter in Seattle is slim pickings.
What was growing that winter was our family. The girls had a new baby brother, born in the early days of December. I went to the hospital at the end of his first day and met this tiny thing with clear eyes and a steady gaze.
Who will you be? I whispered as I took this small bundle into my arms, so tender and warm. Who will you be in our family? His name was Graham. With this new arrival, the circle was growing larger.
People complained about the Seattle winter—sometimes even me—but in truth I liked the downtime. I liked not having to go up to the garden, not having to weed or water. Summer is a frenetic period in Seattle. The days are long, the weather good, and residents feel an urge, a compulsion, a responsibility, to pack all the fun into two or three months. All the hiking, the camping, the swimming, the sunning, the picnics, the parties, the boating, the lazing. It all must be done in July and August. After that you’re living on borrowed time. September could be nice, October even, but any day it could start raining again.
As much as I loved the northwestern summer, I had come to love that it did eventually rain. Finally I could slow down. Finally I could stay home and read books and plan cozy dinner parties. Finally I could hibernate. For all my travel and adventures, it seemed I was a homebody at heart.
When it came to home, however, I was soon to be out of mine. I had sublet a tiny apartment on the top floor of an old brick building with a view of Puget Sound and the sun setting fiery behind the snowcapped Olympic Mountains. It was impractical, out of my budget, and temporary, but the moment I saw a photo of it, with the sun slanting through large windows and the mullioned panes of the French doors onto hardwood floors, I knew it had to be mine. It was only for nine months. I would make it work.
“It’s like a magic carpet ride,” said a friend when she first saw the apartment. With large windows on three sides and the lights of Ballard twinkling below at night, that’s exactly how it felt. In the daytime I sat at my desk in the corner between huge windows and watched the sun arc across the sky. Small floatplanes bound for remote islands drifted by my perch, snowcapped mountains carved a jagged horizon across calm waters, and sunset painted the wide expanse in shades of brilliant pink and orange. In those moments I felt as deeply happy as I had ever been.
Come spring the original tenant, who now lived in Europe, offered to let me take over the lease. It was tempting, but the rent was going up, I’d be locked into a yearlong commitment, and I’d begun to have fantasy dreams in which the closet somehow morphed into a bedroom. Though I knew I would miss the view for the rest of my life, I sadly said no. The small studio apartment was a magic carpet ride, not a long-term place to live.
“Why don’t you stay here for the summer?” my mom asked one day when we were working in the garden. She was getting ready to leave for Canada and would be gone three months. When she returned, I planned to go to Japan for a long-overdue visit. “You don’t need a place until November,” she pointed out. “That’s six months. Just think of all the money you’ll save.”
I sat back on my heels in the garden bed where I had been transplanting and thought about it. I knew immediately I didn’t like the idea.
“I don’t want to live in your house,” I told her. “I want to live in my house.”
My mother’s house smelled of sandalwood and Japanese indigo dye, an unusual scent that often made westerners wrinkle their noses; it smelled of her. I wanted someplace that smelled like me. No matter how practical, there was something strange about living under my mother’s roof at this stage of my life.
“Suit yourself,” she said, “but the garden needs you.”
That was true. The garden needed me. The garden needed a lot.
Almost every day that spring my mother had been out there, hoeing, weeding, planting, working on the three large beds along the south side of the yard. I had begun to think of this area as her private kale garden.
When she gardened she wore old sweatshirts, many of them castoffs from my teen years. The cotton fabric was so faded only I knew what color they had started out as. There were holes sprouting from cuffs, and the hems hung low, yet my mother wore them still.
As a child I had dressed up in her clothes, trying to be a grown-up. Now I was a grown-up—even if I didn’t always feel that way—and my mother was wearing the faded remnants of what had been mine. Every time I saw her slight figure at work, a rush of emotion went through me. My tiny mother, so determined, so driven. Even now, at an age when others took up bridge, my mother was working hard. She was a hummingbird, constantly in motion.
“Can’t you just sit down so we can have a conversation?” I sometimes asked. “You’re always working.” It was the same thing I had been saying since childhood.
“My work ethic has really paid off for you over the years,” she’d respond tartly.
I knew what she meant: the private college I attended that she had paid for; the time spent in Europe and at summer camp; the theater tickets and museum visits and piano lessons; the bicycles, computers, and large checks written. She meant a million things, big and small, that she had given my brother and me. Things no one had given her. And here I was, ungrateful.
She took my words as criticism. She never understood their real meaning. She never understood that when I asked her to sit down, when I wanted her to stop working, just for a moment, to talk to me, to look me in the eye, I was saying one thing, over and over.
I want you more than I want those other things. I just want you.
But she never stopped. She never sat still. There was always something she needed to do. And I never found the words to explain what I really wanted from her, what I needed.
In the prior couple of years, my mother had tried to calm her hummingbird ways. More than once she had declared this was the year she was going to slow down. These announcements came as New Year’s resolutions or after some injury. She had broken her foot twice now, once running for an airplane, once tripping down the stairs in a rush.
“I really got the message this time,” she told me after a particularly bad injury. “Time to slow down.”
But her version of slowing down never looked very different from what had come before. I couldn’t tell if there had actually been a change.
“What do you think would happen if you did slow down?” I asked once, in a moment of tenderness between us after a fight, when I felt more like the mom than she did. “What would happen?”
“You know,” she said slowly, all the bluster worn out. “I’ve been going so fast for so long…” Her voice was low and serious, no drama. “I think if I really did slow down, I might just die.”
My mother’s work in the kale garden had paid off that spring. The three broad beds had filled with sprouts of green as the seedlings took root and grew tall. The shiny green leaves of the pak choi were dark with white veins, the lettuces ruffled like petticoats in shades of rust and speckled lime. The chard unfurled on stems of lurid magenta and goldenrod, and the kale put forth grayish-green leaves so bumpy they reminded me of the topography of a globe. It was a fountain of green in my mother’s garden that spring.
What were not plentiful that spring were apartments or houses I wanted to move into. I had fallen in love with my neighborhood and the view that looked toward the Olympic Mountains. After a few years in Seattle surrounded by trees, living in shadow, I knew my happiness over the long winter depended on as much light as I could get and a view of the setting sun. I might be leaving my hilltop perch, but I didn’t want to leave the hill.
Permaculture had helped me settle on this neighborhood, a collection of streets lined with small homes and tidy front yards. I had taken the lessons I learned about mapping and flow and drawn routes to all the places in the city I went on a regular basis—farmers’ markets, the library, my mother’s house, my brother’s. There were other things I wanted: a direct bus line downtown, a view toward the west, access to parks and green. When I marked them all on a map, it became clear. I picked the hilly neighborhood right in the middle and was surprised by how happy I felt there. There was no effort in my life any longer; everything I needed was close at hand. It was an ease I hadn’t previously known. Always before life had felt like hard work.
There were other old buildings on the hill, full of the vintage details I loved, and I put my name on the waiting list for the next available space in one of them. The units were bigger there—a small dining room in addition to bedroom and living room. It wasn’t the magic carpet ride, but it would do.
While I waited I looked. The neighborhood was filled with small Craftsman houses: long on charm but too large for one person and more than I wanted to pay. As my springtime departure grew closer, I looked harder. There were rental units in some of these houses, but usually they were converted basements. Winter in Seattle was dark and damp enough without living underground. I did not want to become a mole.
“You’re sure you don’t want to live here for the summer?” my mother offered again.
I was sure, but as months ticked by and I still didn’t find anything, I began to reconsider. Maybe I could live in the garden cottage. I could put my desk there and write with a view of blooming flowers and fruit trees.
I imagined wandering out to pull weeds when faced with a particularly tricky passage that needed some pondering. When I had research to do, I could read in the hammock. I wouldn’t be living in my mother’s house—I would be living in the garden. Then I would be off to Japan. With the money I would save, I could stay longer, travel more.
It wasn’t ideal—but it was practical. And from summers spent working as a wilderness instructor, I was used to throwing things in storage for the season; I’d spent months living in a tent. Surely the cottage would not be so bad. And as my mother said, the garden needed me.
A month before my lease was up, the woman from whom I rented the apartment returned to move her belongings out of the studio with the view. My mother was out of town, so I stayed at her house for the week, a trial run of sorts. I didn’t bother to set up the cottage.
But staying at my mother’s house meant sleeping in the upstairs guest bedroom, a poky space facing the street with high windows that were long and narrow. After the wide view and huge picture windows of my apartment, it felt closed in, like sleeping in a coffin. I hated it.
I spent most of my time in the downstairs room my mother had converted to her office. It had a view out large windows looking down the hill to the cottage and the field below. In late spring, it was a glorious sight.
The magnolia was festooned with blossoms—magenta on the outside, a pale shell-pink on the velvety interior. The irises and tulips were giving up their bright colors, deep purple shriveling up into a dried golden husk. The raspberries were covered with tiny white blossoms, and carrots that had been started from seed were pushing feathery green tops out of damp soil. To watch tiny seeds cleave soil took my breath away—all that life somehow emerging from a speck of brown. It seemed miraculous. It was.
I sat there, at my mother’s desk, and took it all in.
I had never spent the night at Orchard House; I had never seen the garden at dawn. Within a day or two, I started sleeping downstairs, on a foldout futon in the office, so I could see morning break over the garden. From where I slept, I had a view down the lawn all the way to the orchard and the houses beyond. One of them had small white lights strung on its back deck. At night they twinkled and looked like the fairies I had imagined as a child. The whole scene felt like it was touched by magic.
In the mornings I opened my eyes to an entirely different landscape. There was fog some mornings. The tall cedars wrapped in mist looked ghostly and beautiful. Some days were clear and sunny, still cool in the morning when I took my cup of tea out on the patio and prepared to start my day. Some days I took a blanket with me, to wrap around bare feet as I sat there in silence. The only sounds were the chickens clucking and crowing in the neighbor’s yard next door. Though the house lay within Seattle city limits, it felt miles away.
One morning I woke up to hazy white covering the garden, on the grass and the plants. I blinked, not believing what I was seeing. Was it frost? It couldn’t be—not in late May. Was it snow?
I opened the door, preparing for cold, but felt only a mild breeze. As I walked across the patio barefoot, I saw it wasn’t frost at all.
A heavy blanket of dew had condensed and now hung from every blade of grass and sprig of flower or vegetable. From a distance it looked like a frosty haze, but when I got close, each drop glittered in the early-morning sunshine. Each drop reflected the world back to me, as if they were a million tiny mirrors. Each drop revealed beauty.
How lucky I am to see this. If I hadn’t stayed, I would never have known. The magic would have happened without me.
When my mother returned, I told her I would stay there for the summer. Two weeks later, when the apartment building where I had put my name on the waiting list called to say there was a unit available, I told them no thanks. I would be spending my summer in the garden. It needed me.
And maybe I needed it too.
I hadn’t moved often. Not the way most Americans do—with rental trucks and packing blankets and furniture wheeled out on a dolly. I left for college with exactly two duffel bags and a box sent after me. I moved to Japan with three suitcases and several crates of books. And when I moved into San Francisco, from my mother’s house across the bridge, I did it gradually, taking little bits here and there in my car. I felt an odd pride that nothing I owned was too big to fit in the back of my station wagon. Besides one very heavy black desk, nothing was too big for me to carry. I could do it all on my own.
I even tried to move the desk by myself once, too impatient to wait for help. That is how I hurt my back, an injury that continued to aggravate me years later with occasional flare-ups. Sometimes it incapacitated me. This usually happened when I picked up something heavy or unwieldy without waiting for help. Some of us are slow learners, or maybe just stubborn. Some of us think we can do everything on our own.
My first Seattle move, however, to the charming studio sublet, had been a different experience. In Seattle, it seemed, you didn’t do things alone.
“Your homework is to let people help you move,” my friend Mary told me, as I started to plan and pack.
“What do you mean?”
“You have such a hard time asking for help—this is the perfect opportunity.”
“I don’t think I can do that,” I told her. I didn’t mention a friend had once nicknamed me Lone Wolf.
Then Mary sat me down and told me a story.
When she and her girlfriend moved into the house they now share, they decided it was time to hire movers. They weren’t in their twenties anymore—it was no longer okay to ask friends for help in exchange for pizza and beer. It was time to be grown-up. So they threw money at the problem and hired out the labor. The move went smoothly, and all was fine until Mary’s best friend found out what they had done. Then he got mad.
“Why?” I asked. Wouldn’t most people prefer not to hoist boxes and lift furniture on a sunny Saturday? No one wants to spend a weekend that way.
“He said I hadn’t given him the chance to help—I had taken away the opportunity for us to become closer.”
I thought about this. In San Francisco I had never been asked to help anyone move, but in Seattle I already had been. When friends moved out of the city to a nearby island, I had packed my car full of their artwork and breakables and driven it onto the ferry and to their new house at the other end. Then I helped unload the truck until my back got so inflamed I had to lie on the floor in their new yellow living room. My friend and her baby lay next to me, and we laughed at how crazy the whole moving process is. When someone walked in carrying a box of angst-filled journals from my friend’s younger years, we joked that the warning label should not read “heavy”; it should be weighty.
Helping had made me feel closer to my friends. I liked feeling that I was a small part of this new adventure in their lives, as if I was part of their family of friends. Years from now we would still share those memories of dusty packing boxes and exhaustion, the small yet rich details of life as we live it.
“Oh, yes,” my friend Sarah said when the subject came up on one of our walks. “Moving is how you know who your friends are.” And then she volunteered to help me move.
I was still not convinced—the whole idea made me feel uncomfortable. What if I asked and no one came? What if they came and saw the contents of my messy drawers and ran away? What if they thought worse of me? It seemed easier to keep it all at arm’s length, to do it myself, to pay people if needed. Asking for help made you vulnerable.
I probably would have tried to pack and move the contents of a three-story house by myself, but I wasn’t given the choice. That old back injury returned to haunt me. An awkward twist with a packing box and suddenly I was in pain. I couldn’t lift heavy things, and I certainly couldn’t carry them up three flights of stairs. I needed my friends. I needed their help.
There was an uncomfortable email sent to those who had offered: So, about that moving thing…I might need your help after all. To my surprise, people actually showed up.
Jennifer and Carrie packed my kitchen, taking far more care wrapping dishes than I ever would have. Kairu brought boxes and packed up my children’s-book collection. Marianne drove those boxes across town in her minivan, Anne mopped my living room floor, Sarah helped carry furniture, and in the midst of the frenzy, Viv volunteered to scrub out my refrigerator.
“You sure you want to do that? It’s pretty gross.”
“Oh, yes,” she said far more enthusiastically than I expected.
It made me squirm to have someone scrub the congealed smears and spills from inside my now-empty refrigerator, but I let her. I simply could not afford to turn down help. I gave it a cursory wipe down, then tried to be okay with someone else seeing the grossest bits of my life. It felt like being naked in public.
Halfway through the process, intent on her work, Viv called out for me.
“Do you have any Q-tips? I want to get the cracks really clean.”
By the time she was finished, the fridge was cleaner than when it had come off the manufacturing floor, and Viv was beaming. “Isn’t that better?” she said. “You can call me any time you want your fridge cleaned.”
I sent her home with handfuls of fresh herbs and grateful thank-yous, baffled that this dreaded chore seemed to be something my friend truly enjoyed. “It lets me practice my OCD,” she said with a laugh. “I find it very satisfying.”
Somehow, despite my injured back, my friends helped me out of the house and into the little apartment in the sky—and not a moment too soon. I carried up the last box at 9 A.M., after a night of no sleep, got into the car without showering, and drove to California to attend a summit that started that evening. I never would have made it on my own.
It would be three weeks before I returned to Seattle, but when I did it was to an apartment of carefully wrapped glasses and plates. Every box I opened, every lumpy bundle of crumpled newspaper and bubble wrap, felt like a present from my friends.
I do not know if I have ever felt so loved by so many people.
When it came time to move out of the sublet, however, I didn’t feel I could ask friends. I had learned my lesson—help is good—but it seemed like anyone dumb enough to move more than once in a calendar year forfeited the right to assistance. This time I would be carrying things down the stairs, not up, and many of my things were already in storage; how hard could it be?
I somehow didn’t calculate that I would have to walk back up three flights after each load. Multiply that by thirty or forty, and the stairs became their own circle of hell. I didn’t anticipate that I would get sick, and that packing and hoisting and carrying are much harder with a fever and body-rattling cough. I never imagined I would cling to the banister, pulling myself up hand over hand. I never imagined it would be as bad as it was.
I cursed every box of books I owned. I cursed the twelve pasta bowls I hadn’t put in storage the first time—who needs twelve pasta bowls in a studio apartment? I cursed the winter coats and snow boots and the box of damned Christmas tree ornaments. I considered throwing them all from the top of the stairs, just to see the angels take flight, the glass balls shatter, tinsel and glitter strewn everywhere.
Mary was right. We should not do these things alone, if only to preserve our own sanity. It is sometimes as thin and fragile as a glass Christmas tree ball.
My mother had offered to help, but I had turned her down. We were not a help-out family. All my life I had watched her do everything alone, and I had picked up the message hidden in her actions: to ask for help is somehow shameful; it means you can’t do it on your own.
It’s not that I never asked my mother for help. I just tried to do things myself first. It was only when it became clear that I couldn’t, when I began to get panicky and desperate, that I called my mom. To ask her for help meant I had failed, that I wasn’t as strong or as capable as she was.
I was never as strong or capable as she was.
I knew she would come, but she was the court of last appeals: I would be helped, but I would be judged. My mother was there for me, but she was never a soft place to land.
And anyway, she was packing herself, to go to Canada. I didn’t want to ask when I knew she had work of her own to do.
It never even occurred to me to ask my brother. This seemed like another part of family he liked to keep at a distance. And anyway, he was busy helping his wife and children.
When I called my mother that day, coughing and exhausted and near desperate, she came. She interrupted her own packing to help with mine. When she saw my apartment filled with boxes in various states from full to empty, she sighed. “Why must you always be so disorganized?” she said, and then she got to work. We carried things down the stairs and filled up her car. I was weak on my legs, light-headed as I shoved things into the nooks and crannies of her trunk.
“I’m done,” she said, standing by the side of her now full car. She meant she was done with helping; she was done with me.
“Can I just run up and get the plants?”
The woman I had sublet the apartment from had left her plants, even though, when she asked, I’d said I didn’t want them. They were big, spiky things that took up room, but after nearly a year of keeping them alive, I had a hard time tossing them in a dumpster. My mom had agreed to take a few. Others I had put in the building lobby with a note, and they had eventually disappeared. Adopted, I hoped, by other residents.
My mom slammed the car door in irritation. “I’m getting too old for this shit.” Then she looked at me and sighed. “Go get the plants.”
I turned and quickly went back into the apartment building, stomping up the stairs. Why couldn’t she be a supportive mother? Why hadn’t she shown up a week ago with boxes and packing tape? Why didn’t she want to sit on my floor and wrap candle holders and gossip and go out afterward for pizza? I had helped pack up her garage—why didn’t she come help me? Why did I have to ask? Why did she have to judge? Why wasn’t she just there? Why couldn’t she be the mom?
I ran out of stairs before I ran out of complaints.
When I came back down, clutching a pot filled with a spiky thing for which I had no name, my mother had three words for me.
“Call your brother.”
“Do you think he’d come?”
“Of course he would,” she said. “He’s your brother.”
I didn’t say anything. I turned away and waved her off and quickly went into the building. There I sat down on the steps and I cried. I wept at the idea my brother might show up. That he might be there for me.
And then he did. That night, after his children were in bed, my brother came and carried boxes with me—all the boxes that were going in storage. He carried boxes and he teased me. (“No one who has been out of college as long as you should still have a futon.”) And he acted as if it were the most normal thing in the world, though to me it felt astounding.
“I told you he would come,” my mother said when she called later that night to check on me. The apartment was nearly empty; I was washing windows and floors, scrubbing the bathtub, tossing the last few bits of trash into bags and boxes, running on fumes and adrenaline.
When I was desperate and at the end of my rope, my family had shown up for me. I had asked, and they had come. It was the most mundane thing in the world, but for a family with little glue to bind them, it felt like a small miracle.
That first week in the garden, I barely got out of bed. I felt beat-up, so sore from the move and the endless stairs. I was still wracked by coughs, the deep, body-shaking ones that bring up phlegm and mucus, the ones that make you feel like it might actually be possible to cough up a lung or your own spleen.
My mother was gone to Canada for the summer, and I slept most of that week. Not a fitful sleep; I slept like the dead. I stayed upstairs in the coffin room, because it was next to the bathroom, and who cares about a view when you’re not awake?
When I finally staggered out of bed, I was hungry.
It was more than hunger. I wanted something warm, something soothing that would make me feel better—something I could wrap my hands around to feel comfort. It is hard to comfort yourself when you feel miserable. Comfort requires something from the outside.
There was nothing in the fridge. My mother had cleared out her perishables before she left, and the only things I had brought from my apartment were condiments. I stood at the open fridge door, looking in despondently. Then I noticed the container of green Thai curry paste.
I took the plastic tub to the stove and filled a saucepan with water, spooning in as much curry as I could stand. I added bouillon as well and rummaged in the cupboard for a packet of rice noodles. I set another pot of water to boil.
As the saucepan simmered on the stove, I left the kitchen and went outside, slowly making my way into the garden. In my free hand, I carried a pair of scissors.
Across the grass lay the kale beds—an assortment of greens my mother had planted and tended. I clipped floppy leaves of chard, long green chives, and ferny bits of cilantro already beginning to bolt. I cut pak choi and tender sprigs of broccoli. I gathered them together and carried them back into the kitchen: the yield of my mother’s efforts, a bouquet of green in my hands.
In the kitchen, I washed the greens quickly, cut them roughly, and stirred them into the simmering broth. As the leaves wilted into the steamy soup, I removed the pot from the heat. I drained the noodles and added them, with a tiny bit of fish sauce for saltiness, some lime for sour.
I poured the whole thing into a bowl and wrapped my hands around the warmth of it. I leaned forward into the sour-tanged steam and tried to breathe deep. When I sipped the broth, the heat and fiery chilies began to open my long-clogged nose and chest. Though my taste buds were muffled, I sensed lemongrass, the sharpness of lime. Soft noodles slipped down a throat that ached from coughing, and the greens were chewy and tender. I knew they were good for me.
My mother wasn’t there to comfort me—she had rarely been able to give me what I needed. But here was a garden of vegetables she had worked hard to grow. Now, when I needed it most, she was nourishing me. She couldn’t give me herself. Instead she had given me the tools to be strong on my own. Perhaps that was her greatest gift to me: resilience and strength, the ability to survive.
Maybe this is how my mother loves me. Maybe this is the best she can do.
I drank down the entire bowl of soup, chewing the soft noodles and toothy greens. I ate another bowlful and went back to bed. The next day I made more, picking more greens from the garden. The supply there seemed endless.
I made that green noodle curry over and over, for weeks on end, until I was fully well again. I never grew tired of it.