IN THE YEARS WHEN I was trying to decide between Seattle and San Francisco, I heard a speech given by a chef—Dan Barber of the Blue Hill restaurants in New York. He told of visiting an award-winning foie gras producer in Spain who didn’t cage or force-feed his geese. They roamed and gorged themselves on crops he grew. What fencing he had was electrified on the outside only—to keep predators away. He did nothing to keep his animals in.
One day Barber and the farmer were in the fields when a flock of wild geese flew overhead. The farmer’s geese began to honk, and the wild geese honked back, and suddenly the wild geese made a wide, sweeping turn and landed in the field with the farmer’s geese.
Barber was amused. “They come for a visit?”
“No,” the farmer said. “They come to stay.”
Barber knew the DNA of a goose is programmed to make them fly south in the winter and north in the summer. How could they suddenly change generations of evolution and stay at the farm?
When he asked this, the farmer shook his head. “Their DNA is to find the conditions that are conducive to life, to happiness,” he said. “They find it here.”
For me that story rang like the clear, high note of a bell. It was the best summation I’d heard of that thing we all look for—in a relationship, a job, a home. We are seeking the conditions of our greatest happiness. It is what we are programmed to do.
In trying to decide if I should stay in San Francisco or gamble on what I might be able to build in Seattle, I had made endless pro and con lists. But Barber’s story made me realize it was time to make a new list. What were the conditions of my greatest happiness? Where was I more likely to find what I needed most?
When I did this, the results were surprising. Hidden in the list, the same concept came up over and over; it was something I hadn’t truly considered before.
Community.
For all its woes and heartbreak, for every flea-beetle-eaten leaf of arugula and withered seedling, gardening is a fairly straightforward thing. Nature will always throw curve balls—the unexpected late frost, the summer of drought—but in other ways the process is not mysterious. If you want to grow a sunflower, you plant a sunflower seed and make sure to water it adequately. A strawberry plant will, in most cases, give you strawberries. The instructions are there. How well you execute them is up to you.
Community, however, is a harder thing to grow. What seeds do you plant? How do you water? Books have been written about the micronutrients you need in your soil, the recommended balance of ingredients for a compost pile, but human life is a more complicated and variable thing. How do you find your people? How do you weave the sort of net you need—one you can cling to in hard times, one that will catch you if you fall?
My first summer in Seattle I wasn’t looking for community. I had come to get away, to work on a book, to play with my nieces. I had exactly three friends in the city—enough to provide some social interaction but not enough to take me away from my work. I went for long walks and even longer bike rides and was happy with this smaller existence. It felt like a vacation from real life. I knew it was temporary.
Then I met a neighbor—a single mom with twin daughters just entering their teens. It was she who showed me how to mound up the raked leaves around my new raspberry bushes to mulch them. When I needed to get the large dining table I had bought home, she volunteered her minivan and wouldn’t accept money for it. She invited me on berry-picking excursions in the country, and once or twice, when she knew I was racing a big deadline and consumed with work, she showed up on my doorstep in the early evening with a covered plate of whatever she had made her own family that night. “I know you’re busy,” she said. “Now you don’t have to worry about making dinner.”
I had never experienced anything like that. I had taken my neighbor to the emergency room when he was sick and needed to go, but it never would have occurred to me to make dinner for him. Seattle was a city, but sometimes it felt more like a village.
Not everyone experiences the warmth I found in Seattle. The city is known for a polite but sometimes frosty demeanor—people are friendly, but it can be hard to break through to actual friendship. They call it the Seattle Freeze, and there are many theories about the cause. Some speculate it goes back to the reserved personalities of Nordic settlers in the region; others point to the weather and annual hibernation that keeps people within their own social groups; still others cite studies that show Washingtonians to be some of the most introverted people in the nation. The rise of modern-day tech culture in the city probably doesn’t help.
This was not my experience. The first winter I spent in Seattle, a man I had written a brief article about heard I was arriving in November and planning to stay the winter. “We must have you over,” he emailed. “Otherwise you won’t meet anyone until spring.” That man became my friend Knox.
That first winter Knox invited me to a soup-swap party—an idea born when he grew tired of making big pots of soup and eating leftovers for a week. He figured his friends must be in the same situation and invited people over to swap their soup. When he put up a website, word spread; the event is now celebrated around the world.
That evening his house was crowded with friends, the windows steamy, rain jackets discarded on the porch. Everyone brought containers of frozen soup they’d made, and horse trading of sorts occurred, with people bragging about secret family recipes or tempting ingredients, the competition good-natured and humorous. Afterward we ate tacos in the kitchen, and I went home that night with six containers of soup made by people I did not know.
I doled the soup out over the next few months, each time marveling at how comforting it was to have food I had not made myself. It felt different than takeout. Someone had stirred this soup in their own kitchen. They had labored over it with all good intentions. And somewhere else in the city, someone was eating soup I had made.
Perhaps food was the key that unlocked the city for me. My first friends in Seattle were food writers, and through them I met more: writers and restaurateurs and enthusiastic home cooks. Food people are some of the most generous you can find—mostly they just want to feed you. There were picnics and potlucks and excursions to sample a new restaurant or café. Eventually I found myself invited into a club where we cooked from the same cookbook and gathered to share the results.
The first meeting I attended was a blur. We met at the home of one of the members. There were a dozen women, a few babies or toddlers. I knew only the woman who had invited me, but we had all cooked Diana Kennedy’s Mexican food and sat together chatting and laughing for a few hours, a break from life and weekend responsibilities. Within the group were various connections and deeper friendships, but everyone was kind and friendly, and I went home having enjoyed my afternoon.
I was beginning to realize that friendship and community are not the same thing. Friendships are threads between people, either strong or tenuous, but community is a web. In San Francisco I’d had plenty of friends, but over time they slowly moved out of the city to far-flung suburbs for jobs or houses or better schools. They were still my friends, but I was losing my sense of community. I no longer had Paul living up the street, Michelle down by the park, Matt and Mireya a bike ride away. When I dreamed of gathering people around a table, it was community that I longed for.
It seemed to me that, these days, money often took the place of community. I could hire movers rather than asking friends, or order in soup or have tissues and prescriptions delivered when I was sick, rather than bothering someone I knew. The making of money also interfered with community—sometimes it felt like I was working so hard that I didn’t have time for the kindness I might want to give. I sometimes wondered if, with money, we were chasing a false god, one that could not give us what we truly needed.
As our lives have changed, community sometimes now lived online. I could tell social media that I was sick and get responses of sympathy—from former work colleagues or people I went to high school with but haven’t seen for years. It was nice, but it wasn’t the same. I was connected electronically to people all over the world, but I didn’t know the names of the people who lived across the street from me. If I needed to go to the hospital, my friends in London would not be able to help.
I’m not sure what it was about Seattle that made it feel different—the long winters, the rugged pioneer spirit passed down through history, the geography that puts it far away from almost everything else in the country. Or perhaps it was the economic boom-and-bust cycle. Seattle had known rough times, the sort that make people stick together.
Whatever it was, I liked it. Washington wasn’t the rolling golden hills and dark oak trees of Northern California. The snowcapped mountains surprised me when I caught a glimpse of them; they stunned me silent. I was still unaccustomed to having to wait so long for spring. But in other ways—in ways that really mattered—it felt like home. It wasn’t the home I had grown up in, but Seattle fit me. I felt grounded here.
Then there was the funny thing, the thing that felt almost mystical. My father had come from Washington, he had been born here. Though I knew almost nothing of his early life, I had researched his family enough to know that they had come to Washington in the 1800s. In the state capitol in Olympia, there was a portrait of my great-grandfather, a member of the Washington state legislature in 1925.
When I helped my mother pack up her garage that day in California, we had found books that belonged to my father, from classes he had taken at the University of Washington. His Seattle address was neatly written on the inside cover: Brooklyn Avenue. It was a name I knew well. It was the cross street to where my brother lived.
In a vast world of places my brother could have ended up, he had made his way to Seattle and bought a house just a few blocks away from where his own father had lived. A father he had never known. It was like those monarch butterflies whose descendants migrate back to the same breeding grounds, though the grandchildren themselves have never been there. Somehow they just know.
Perhaps, in ways that far exceeded my understanding, we were all just making our way home.
The cookbook club met every other month, each time in someone’s home. In late November we made Indian food, gathering together on an afternoon when most people were battling holiday lines in shopping malls. There was a Persian food fest one rainy spring, where the colors of the dried fruit hinted at blossoms yet to come. Our Julia Child feast included more butter than anyone cared to admit, and for a January cocktail party, we all dressed up and clinked glasses in a member’s condo overlooking the twinkling lights of the city. By the end of that evening, we were sitting around the edge of the indoor swimming pool, fancy shoes long discarded, feet dangling in the water, talking and laughing. It felt like an evening that would sparkle in memory for years to come.
There were offshoot events as well: apple picking in the fall, weekend coffee-shop gatherings to craft and chat, an occasional dinner party or camping trip. Postcards flew back and forth between members with surprising regularity. If I mentioned I was sick, there were offers to bring soup, tissues, orange juice.
I was coming to realize that regularity was one of the keys to community—gathering together, telling our stories, keeping in touch. For some people, attending religious service works in the same way, or team sports, or regular visits to the community center or the coffee shop or the pub—people find comfort where they may. Warmth and connection grow with repetition; the reason for the gathering is almost immaterial.
One September evening we sat at a long backyard table lit by candles, and I looked around at these women. In the period we had known each other, there had been babies born, jobs lost and won, hard times with parents, breakups, minor breakdowns: life, in all its sweetness and sorrow. Through it all, every other month, we had shown up with our covered dishes, ready to share. Sometimes the cookbook felt like just an excuse to gather.
Now, when I rode my bike back from the garden, I passed the homes of people I knew—Martine, Lucia, Megan and Sam, Naomi and Brett, Kate, Renee, Jess and Jim. It felt cozy, as if the city was honeycombed with people I cared about.
I hadn’t grown up with this, and perhaps that is why it mattered so much to me. My mother didn’t have community when my brother and I were young—I’m not sure she realized it was an option. There’s a give-and-take that happens in community that she didn’t seem to have figured out. Perhaps she never had the time.
The garden was teaching me about giving—and about surplus. I had planted two artichokes the first spring. One made it; the other withered due to my own lack of attention. Knox gave me a third artichoke when he was dividing the plants in his yard. The first year or two they didn’t do much, beside produce outrageously large silver-gray foliage that smelled a little piney, a little like a tomato plant. The leaves grew so large they blocked the path. They looked primeval. Every so often I had to hack them back just to get through.
Over time, however, they began to produce. The first flush yielded thirty-four artichokes, and there was more to come. I harvested them small and cooked them with potatoes and white wine and parsley, an Italian recipe from my friend Luisa’s family, but there were too many to keep up with. When I mentioned this, the artichoke lovers in cookbook club raised their hands. A few weeks later I tucked some into Martine’s mailbox and left a few more in a package with Kairu’s doorman.
“I never knew artichokes had a scent,” Martine wrote me in a note afterward.
It’s true. Artichokes sold in grocery stores don’t smell like anything. They are trucked in from California, days or weeks old. Even artichokes bought in supermarkets in California don’t smell like anything. I felt pride in introducing someone to the real deal.
“That was the best artichoke I’ve ever had,” Kairu wrote. “It cooked so quickly!”
I liked sharing things from the garden. With all this land, so much was possible. If I had extra, I wanted to pass it along. This was something my mother had never understood.
My mother was generous to strangers, to causes. She donated to many charities, served on the board of nonprofit organizations, sponsored students in developing countries. Once, when I was ten, we took in a Cambodian refugee to live with us. His family had fled the violence and genocide in that country. At the time we didn’t have much to spare, but we had more than he did.
My mother might have thought her money could do more good elsewhere—and she may not have been wrong—but I think it went deeper. My mother never learned the give-and-take of community. She was okay donating where nothing was expected in return. To develop an exchange, to connect, was harder. You had to give, but also to receive.
I had problems with this as well. I was okay with the giving part, but the accepting made me feel awkward and indebted. I often tried to calculate the amount of money a friend spent on me, so I could adequately repay them. If I was given a forty-dollar present, I would pick up the tab for a forty-dollar dinner. I hadn’t yet learned that true friendship transcends numbers.
If someone was outrageously kind—above and beyond the call of duty—it made me feel uncomfortable, unbearably so. I didn’t know how to sit with that feeling; I didn’t know how to submit to that kind of love. Instead of being gracious, I tried to pretend it wasn’t happening. I tried to avoid the person who made me feel this way. Being outrageously nice was the easiest way to drive me away.
I knew it was ridiculous, but I couldn’t stop myself. I had no model for this type of connection. Generosity on that level left me frozen and exposed, like a deer in the headlights. I had nowhere to hide.
I lost friends this way, kind people who didn’t understand why their gestures of affection were not being acknowledged.
Sometimes it seemed that I was too much like my mother: Trying to love me was like trying to hug a porcupine as well.
I knew this wasn’t the way it should work. It made me feel good to be there for people I cared about. It would have broken my heart if any of my friends had been in need and not let me help. And yet, in turning down help, I was keeping people at a distance. By not letting them be there for me, I was preventing those bonds from growing. I knew it even as I was doing it.
The life I wanted—the community I wanted to be part of—was founded on the back-and-forth. That was how the web was built. I had to be okay with the discomfort. It was easier to stay on my own, but that wasn’t going to get me what I wanted.
If the net was there to hold me, I had to learn how to be held.
The chickens had grown all summer, sprouting their adult plumage and changing color. The baby chicks turned from scrubby brown fluff balls into beautiful hens. Their feathers were smooth shades of golden and russet red that glinted in the sunlight. All day long they darted around their yard with the energy of teeny-boppers. Domino, the older, white-and-black-speckled hen, looked positively bored with their juvenile antics.
As the summer progressed, they began to lay eggs. The first were small—the size of a large walnut—but they eventually grew larger and larger. By August we were getting four full-sized eggs almost every day. Domino’s eggs were a pinkish brown, but the younger chicks laid eggs in shades of pale blue-green, like sea glass found on the beach.
With all the chickens laying, there were about two dozen eggs a week. I sent some home with my sister-in-law for the kids to eat and took some back to my kitchen, but I couldn’t keep up with the production. I was reminded of a friend who grew up on a farm in the Midwest. When she was young, she said, eggs had not been a year-round thing. Chickens stop laying in the winter; eggs were summer food.
All summer I made frittatas and poached eggs. I put fried eggs on salads, on tortillas, on toast. But still the eggs kept coming. When I went out of town for nearly a week and came home to forty eggs, I laughed. We had an excess—an egg-cess. It was almost problematic.
I washed them up and put them in egg cartons and delivered some to my brother and sister-in-law. The rest I dropped off at friends’ houses on my way home. I knew my mother would not approve—the eggs were for family. But we had plenty, and every day the chickens laid more.
When I ran up the stairs that day to leave eggs for my friend Kate, she opened the door.
“Hey, do you want some fish?” she asked.
I must have given her a funny expression because she laughed.
“My father-in-law went fishing in Alaska. Our freezer is full of fish. Do you want some?”
Usually I would have said no; I would have said I was fine. But I was trying to accept. I was trying to be gracious.
“Sure. I’ll take some fish.”
Kate returned with a package of salmon and a package of halibut.
“That seems like a lot,” I said. “Are you sure? It’s only a half-dozen eggs.” I was still thinking generosity should be equal, that things should be even.
Kate waved off my concern. “We have a ton. Thanks for the eggs!”
This was what my mother didn’t understand: When you pick the right people to be in your web, they give back. If you do it right, you let them. You say please and thank you, and everyone walks away gratified—having been of service and been served. This is how the web grows strong.
When I got home and put the fish in the freezer, I smiled. My mother would not have approved, but maybe her life had never felt abundant enough to include this sort of giving—generosity not to those who were starving or fleeing genocide but simply to be kind. Because you wanted to. Because you could.
But here is the thing that made me smile. Here is the thing I thought was funny.
The fish was worth more than the eggs I had given Kate; I’m pretty sure the fish was worth more than all the eggs I had given away.
Not that I was keeping track or anything.
That summer in the garden felt like a steamroller. I had gotten used to the overwhelmingness, the feeling like I was never going to keep on top of everything—not even of the weeds. But this year was different. It was drier than it ever had been. Spring had been unusually lacking in rain, something Seattle rarely lacks.
“Is this global warming?” I heard people say when it hit seventy degrees in May.
I liked it when we were playing croquet on the lawn in April and spreading out picnic blankets. By June, however, I could see the damage to the garden. The raspberries had not received their proper dose of moisture in the flower or fruiting stage, and the resulting berries were tasteless. In an average year, they were overwhelming—so many it was hard to keep up with them. When it rained in June, as it usually did, you had to get picking, or the berries would soon be molding on their canes.
That year it didn’t rain in June—it hadn’t rained much at all—and the berries were so disappointing I barely picked any. They weren’t good enough to eat. Instead of molding on their canes, they withered in the unexpectedly warm sunshine.
Water was something I’d thought about when trying to decide between San Francisco and Seattle. There are plenty of people who consider Seattle’s rainfall a drawback, but I put it on the positive side of my pro-con lists.
In permaculture class we had seen maps created by the Department of the Interior that outlined areas of potential conflict over water—the whole Southwest, including California. When I thought about how the climate was changing, it had me worried. California had a year-round growing season, but not much grows without water. Seattle seemed a safer choice.
I felt a little crazy factoring precipitation rates into future life planning, worrying about drought or famine. I felt like my mother, expecting the worst, expecting the sky to fall. But perhaps I was also being like my ancestors, suspicious enough to ensure my own survival. A friend of mine who wrote about natural sciences had told me that animal migration patterns were already changing; they were heading to higher, cooler ground.
In all my consideration of climate, however, I didn’t really think it would affect me. If water became an issue, it would be in the future, it would be in California. I hadn’t thought I’d be dealing with drought just a few years later. I hadn’t expected it in Seattle. But here we were.
A drought is survivable for a garden if you have enough water, but it means you must work harder. The watering routine that usually took an hour and a half now took twice that long; plants I had never watered before now needed it—perennials and fruit trees. Between general garden maintenance and watering, I was run ragged.
Early that spring my mother had arranged to have a catchment system installed to funnel rainwater off the roof of her house into covered holding tanks that could be used to water the garden.
Water catchment was not unusual in Seattle. For years the city had been offering rain barrels at a subsidized rate to residents. They were recycled food-grade plastic fitted with a spigot and connected to a downspout on your house. In times of intense rain, storm water runoff overwhelmed the city drainage system, becoming the largest single source of pollution in local rivers and the Puget Sound. It was better for the city to have water diverted and stored for future use. When I rode my bike to and from the garden, I passed many of these rusty-red barrels installed in people’s yards and gardens.
I had suggested we get rain barrels, but my mother had done the city-issued fifty- or sixty-gallon barrels one better. The tanks she was considering had a minimum holding capacity of 250 gallons. Some were as large as 650 gallons.
“Are you sure we’re going to need that much?” I asked, as we looked at the spot on the side of the house where the tank was to be installed.
“I figure if I’m going to do this—let’s really do this,” my mother said.
What she didn’t say, what neither of us said, were the what ifs. But they hung in the air between us that damp spring day.
What if there was an earthquake? What if Mount Rainier erupted, as some said it was poised to do? What if climate change intensified and sped up? What if the worst came to pass? It would be good, then, to have as much water as possible. This was not drinkable water, but it could be boiled for cooking.
If the worst came to pass, we wouldn’t be that picky.
We had all watched in frozen terror as a tsunami wiped out the coastal regions of northern Japan two years prior. Before that had been the earthquake in Haiti. That fall it was Hurricane Sandy, a year later, Typhoon Haiyan. The worst was coming to pass for so many people. We needed to be prepared.
I couldn’t tell if devastation was happening more frequently, or if modern connectivity just allowed us to watch it in horrifying real-time detail. Devastation had happened throughout history—war, pillage, fire, flood, famine. Those were the times that brought people together. Perhaps that was the truest definition of family: the people you cared for in times of trouble, those you would shelter from the storm.
I didn’t want to think our times of trouble were here already, but I was glad to have gallons and gallons of water for the garden that summer—the fruit trees, the vegetables, the flowers. We needed it far more than I had expected.
None of my friends saw me much that summer; I was in the garden. My apartment quickly became the place I went to drop things, sleep, work, and leave. I showered there too, staining the bathtub with a dark ring made of garden dirt. My fingernails were never entirely clean. The needs of a garden in drought had taken over.
The physicality of it all surprised me. I remembered a young couple I once interviewed about the farm they had started. “This place beats us up,” they told me, and I now knew what they meant. After nine hours in the garden, I woke the next day feeling like I had been battered, bruised in unexpected spots, sore in ways I never had been before. What was I doing this for again?
But sometimes, at the end of a long day in the garden, I looked up and noticed how the sunlight slanted through the tops of the blackberry bushes; how it was captured in the dahlias I had massed together, which now bloomed in fiery orange and pink, their pom-pom petals waving on long stems in the gentle breeze; how the alpine strawberry border I had planted was now studded with tiny white blooms and small garnet fruit, shockingly sweet. In those moments it took my breath away. Instead of seeing the weeds, as I usually did, I saw the beauty, and I knew I’d had a hand in creating it.
In those moments the long days and unexpected bruises felt worth it. In those moments it all made sense. None of us knew how long we would be here, what the future held. How better to spend your days than by creating beauty in the small corner of the world that was yours? If that was all I did, it would be enough.
I tried to be brave and invite people to the garden. My mother had redone her kitchen that winter; now it opened up onto the deck, and it was more pleasant to spend time there. We had put the picnic table on the deck, and it was a nice spot to have dinner. From the deck you could almost squint and not see the weeds of the garden, not see how the vegetable beds were wilting and gasping for moisture.
The kids came over. Sometimes it was just the girls; sometimes it was just the toddler; sometimes it was all three of them. They each had their own garden plot. Graham grew carrots, Cate grew carrots and flowers, and Abby wasn’t particularly interested in growing anything at all. When some errant Shasta daisies landed in her plot, she was happy to let them take over.
Graham had spent more time in the garden, with his grandma, than either of the girls. He seemed more interested in watering and planting than either of them had. That year my mother bought him his own small red wheelbarrow. “I finally got a master gardener!” she joked, as he watered and dug alongside her.
One day, when it was just the two of us in the garden, I led him over to where I had set up the hammocks.
“Do you want to swing in the hammock?” I asked. He looked up at me dubiously.
“Here, I’ll show you”—and I spread the fabric to demonstrate how it could rock back and forth. He smiled shyly as he began to understand.
I lifted this little boy into the hammock—blond and sturdy and looking so much like my brother had when we were kids and I used to swing him in our hammock out in the country. When I placed Graham in the sling of fabric, he twisted around until he was lying on his stomach, his small face peeking out the side. “Okay,” I said, and began to rock him gently.
The grin that appeared on his tiny face started slow and grew until it nearly split him open, so impish and wide I laughed aloud. “Welcome to the family, little guy. You’re a Weaver now”—as if this were the induction ceremony to the run-wild garden tribe that we were. As I had with his sisters, as I had with his father, I pushed the hammock to make it swing. He wouldn’t let me stop.
Eventually he reached out his arms so they stretched beyond the confines of the hammock. “Flying,” he said. “Flying!”
I breathed deep and tried to hold on to that moment, that sunny afternoon in the garden when a little boy took flight for the very first time.
Then I stepped backward, onto a hidden underground wasps’ nest. When I felt the hot stings on my ankle and realized what was happening, I snatched the toddler from the hammock and ran for the house as fast as we could go.
Despite the wasps’ nests, I had offered to host the cookbook club’s annual picnic. The year before we had gathered in a park, but when rain drove us under the shared picnic shelter, we’d had to squeeze between a Peruvian birthday party and a collection of drunken frat boys. In the garden, if it rained, we could shelter in peace.
This meant everyone would see the garden, in all its messy and drought-strained glory. It wasn’t just club members either. The summer picnic was the one gathering where partners and kids were invited too.
When I realized this, I was tempted to cancel, to think up some sort of excuse. But this was about community, about letting people in. Running away was not the answer.
In the past I had gone to great lengths to prepare for company. Once, when I was hosting a dinner for a nonprofit board I served on in San Francisco, I had painted two rooms of my house in advance of their arrival. I told myself it was good motivation for a task I had been meaning to do for ages, but in truth it was a cover-up. Not for the cracks on the ceiling of a charming old building—the cover-up was for me.
There was no way I could fix all that needed to be done in the garden. I didn’t even try. I mowed the lawn. I swept up the patio and set out chairs. I bought new lavender plants—something I had been meaning to do for ages—but I didn’t even manage to plant them.
When the first members of the cookbook club arrived, the lavender plants were sitting in their pots along the side border. They stayed there the whole party, a statement on my lack of perfection, perhaps, but what the heck? A garden is a work in progress—as a life is. It always will be.
I set up drinks on the patio. It wasn’t fancy. There was a stack of mismatched vintage plates found at thrift stores—nothing too good to break. There were cloth napkins and Mason jars and homemade lemonade and a huge pitcher of Pimm’s with mint and strawberries I had grown myself.
I was still carrying down the last of the beverages as people began filtering in. When one member asked if she could use the kitchen, I took her upstairs to show her around. When I came back onto the deck and looked out at the grass, it was covered in picnic blankets—stripes and checks and flowers. They made up a huge checkerboard quilt pattern on the lawn. They looked beautiful.
They also neatly covered up the matted dandelions on the lawn. Bonus.
That afternoon we ate and drank and lounged on the grass. A toddler staggered around on unsteady legs; a kindergartner made piles of wood chips and told us they were butterfly nests. People wandered down the hill to visit the chickens and went back for more food. It struck me that this is what I had been looking for when I came to Seattle. I had wanted this feeling.
And the sun arched overhead, and the breeze blew through the tall grasses of the meadow, and our laughter cascaded down the hill and filled up the space between the fruit trees. Maybe the neighbors even heard it over their fence.
The next day, when I walked across the grass to gather eggs from the chicken coop, I felt differently about the lawn. It was no longer that awful bit of grass pockmarked with dandelions that I still hadn’t gotten around to digging out. It had been transformed by laughter. Now it was where my friends had spread their picnic blankets. It was the lawn on which we had spent the afternoon. It was the place my community had gathered.