I now realize that these first years were only my novitiate, preparing myself to build my little gray garden by the sea.
—ANNA GILMAN HILL, Forty Years of Gardening, 1938
EACH YEAR, THE GARDEN GREW A LITTLE BIGGER. I filled the patio with red geraniums, and morning glories spilled over the fence. The small front room became a greenhouse where I started seeds each winter for the spring vegetable garden. I grew so many varieties of tomatoes that I had to plant some in enormous black plastic nursery pots and put the rest out front, near the sidewalk, where the tourists commented on them but never ripped them out.
A shady stretch of earth along the garage wall became a memorial garden. Gray’s kidneys failed her one spring, when she was twenty and I was twenty-seven. No one I knew had lived with a pet as long as I had lived with Gray. It made sense to bury her in the backyard, where I could plant soft gray lamb’s ears and forget-me-nots at her grave. Her presence changed the garden, bringing a measure of sorrow that I’d never felt out there before. The small, dappled flower bed where she was buried eventually filled with columbine and cottage pinks, Shasta daisies and calla lilies. In the spring, the camellia and wisteria would drop their flower petals all at once, carpeting her grave in carmine red and lilac. It looked like a subdued Mardi Gras. Gray would’ve liked it, I think.
After a few years, Scott and I began to realize we couldn’t live in Santa Cruz forever. The realization crept up on us slowly, and we were reluctant to pay it much attention at first. We loved living in a beach town: We loved the ocean, and the roller coaster, and the fact that all around us, people were on vacation. Now that Gray was buried in the garden, my heart seemed more firmly rooted in our patch of Santa Cruz soil than ever before. But while we lived there, rents had gone sky-high, and we were spending more time than ever at our office jobs just to keep up. It began to seem downright uncivilized to spend fifty or even forty hours a week in a cubicle. I had friends who had found ways to work part-time, travel, and slow down enough to enjoy their lives. I envied them. I wanted to quit my desk job and write a garden column or work in a nursery, but I couldn’t afford to. It took a couple of real, full-time jobs to cover the bills in a high-priced town like Santa Cruz. I also wanted to buy a house—I wanted to own the land I gardened, not just rent it, but that, too, was out of the question. The most modest houses were selling for close to half a million dollars.
I wasn’t the only one who felt that way; Scott had a long and difficult commute into Silicon Valley every day, and as he sat in his car, in the traffic and the smog, he thought about his book business, the orders waiting to be filled, the rare books waiting to be hunted down in dusty old bookstores. There is no good time to quit a day job and pursue a business of one’s own. There is never enough money and there are always risks. But Scott had a lot of time to think about it during those hourlong drives over the hill and back. Life is short, he reasoned. If he didn’t give it a try, he’d always wonder what he’d missed. He, too, was starting to think that the high cost of living in Santa Cruz was keeping him from doing what he really wanted to do.
Gradually, the realization came to us that we should leave Santa Cruz.
First we had to choose a place to live. We had quite a list of requirements: We wanted to stay in California, where I could garden year-round, we wanted to live within walking distance of the ocean, and we wanted to find a small town, one with lots of charming old houses to choose from. Eventually, we decided that our best choice was Eureka, where Scott used to live. It’s a quaint but squarely unpretentious town filled with Victorian homes, known for its fishing harbor and its old-fashioned, brick-lined town square. The weather is very Pacific Northwest—cold, foggy, and rainy—but we decided we wouldn’t mind that. Scott had had a melanoma removed a few years earlier and he was on strict orders to stay out of the sun. When people warned us about Eureka’s gray, overcast weather, he smiled faintly and said, “I think I’ve had enough sun to last a lifetime.”
We didn’t act on our decision right away. We called a couple of real estate agents; we sent away for the newspaper real estate listings. The decision needed time to sink in. We looked at the ocean, we walked past the roller coaster, already shut down for winter. Neither one of us said it, but we were both thinking: Can we really give up all this?
I FOUND MYSELF WALKING through the garden a lot in those days, wondering what plants I would take with me and what I would leave behind. I had a friend who moved her garden once. She and her husband got divorced and he kept the house. They had lived in the house for eight years, and she had amassed an extraordinary collection of rare ornamental plants: tiny, fragile, wispy things smuggled from Australia that she would cover in glass cloches each winter; tropical vines; and ornamental grasses in every shade from chartreuse to spruce blue to red to black. I went over to her house one day while she was digging up her plants. She hadn’t even found a new place to live yet.
“That son of a bitch,” she muttered and she dug. “He told me I had to replace every plant I took.” She straightened up to look me in the eye. “I planted this garden from nothing!” she said. “Marigolds! That’s what he’s getting. Marigolds, pansies, and goddamn impatiens,” she said scornfully, as she looked at the broken up garden around their home.
My plants were all so ordinary—daisies, penstemon, foxglove, salvia—that for a while I didn’t even think about trying to bring them with me. I could buy those plants in Eureka, I told myself, or grow them from seeds when we got there. But I wanted to take something with me from Santa Cruz, so I started digging them up, the daisies, the foxglove, anything I could safely pull out of the ground and stick in a one-gallon pot. I considered taking cuttings from the salvia and propagating them. And I even collected some seeds: pincushion flower, poppy, cosmos, and yarrow, as much as I could shake into an envelope.
There wasn’t much I could take from the vegetable garden. Most of the vegetables were annuals that I started from seed every year, anyway. I considered digging up the artichokes and a few herbs. I knew I’d take Scott’s oregano, the one he brought from Eureka for me to plant when we moved in here. And the asparagus was nonnegotiable—I couldn’t leave it behind. We had brought it as three year-old stock, then nurtured it along in our garden, adding more roots every year. Asparagus takes patience and years of waiting before it will produce a decent-sized crop. Before we moved, I decided, I would dig up the roots and store them in a bucket of dirt for the trip to their new home, giving them a prime spot in the moving van, right next to the worm bin, whose inhabitants would be taking a longer journey than they could ever imagine, all without ever leaving the safe confines of their black plastic home.
WE SET OFF on a house-hunting trip one weekend around Thanksgiving, showing up in Eureka with a list of what we wanted in a house. We made the list on the seven-hour drive from Santa Cruz to Eureka, filling out a long questionnaire that we’d found in the back of a book about how to buy a house. Scott drove, and I read each question aloud and wrote down the answers.
“Style of architecture,” I read. That one was easy: Craftsman or Victorian. Something with history, with character. No suburban ranch homes for us.
“Lot size.” Another easy one. Enormous. Big as we could afford. No large shade trees, because my garden would need all the sun it could get.
“Location.” Walking distance to downtown and the harbor. Once thing we were giving up by moving to Eureka was easy access to the beach. The town is situated inside a sheltered harbor, and to get to a real beach, a beach with sand dunes and waves and shorebirds, we would have to get in the car and drive a few miles. So at the very least, we wanted to be able to walk to dinner, to a movie, and to the edge of the harbor, where the fishing boats unloaded every morning.
By the time we got to town, we had our list. We needed extra bedrooms for guests, for Scott’s office and library, and for my study. We needed a great big kitchen. We needed a fireplace. For two people who had always lived happily in a studio apartment or a small house, we suddenly needed a lot of space.
The realtor met us at noon and took us to a few houses she’d picked out for us. Some had yards that would be too small for my garden. Others seemed cramped and dark, the wrong kind of house in a town that is dark and foggy anyway. Once was right next door to a high school, and teenagers sprawled on the lawn in the afternoons. Scott and I looked at each other and thought the same thing—Teenagers. Worse than tourists. “Oh yeah,” we said to the realtor, “we forgot to mention two things. No busy streets. No high schools.” We went on to the next house, a perfectly restored Craftsman with a bright, airy loft and Arts and Crafts—replica fixtures throughout, but a pair of rotweillers barked at us from across the street, and a car rusted in the lawn next door. The neighborhood made us a little nervous.
Then our realtor said, “This house was just listed this morning. It’s a little out of your price range, but let’s go take a look,” and when she pulled up in front of the freshly painted, three-story Victorian, I could hardly get a breath. It was a storybook of a house, painted a creamy white with pale orange, burgundy, and cornflower blue trim. There were two front doors, side by side, a leftover, the realtor told us, from the days when the house had been divided into two flats. Lace curtains billowed in the windows. Rhododendrons and camellias bloomed in front.
Scott and I followed the realtor inside. We walked slowly through two front parlors, a formal dining room, and a large, sunny kitchen. Upstairs there were four bedrooms and a large bathroom with an old claw-foot tub—the bathtub I’ve always wanted, the bathtub I could already picture myself soaking in after a long day in the garden. Up another flight of stairs: a full attic, in need of nothing more than a little insulation and some drywall to make it into the perfect writer’s retreat, with a bird’s-eye view of the garden.
And what a garden it would be! Outside, there was a lot more land than we had in Santa Cruz: a long, narrow strip of front yard about fifty-five feet across and fifteen feet deep, a shady side yard next to the kitchen, and a wide, sunny yard on the other side. In back, a good forty by forty feet of open land, enough space for a vegetable garden twice as large as my garden in Santa Cruz.
We saw a few other houses that day, taking pictures and jotting down notes at each one. We got the pictures developed and took them with us to dinner that night, paging through our notes and talking over each house we saw. Scott liked another Victorian, smaller but beautifully restored, that was on a smaller parcel of land. The price was great—around $95, 000—but the neighborhood seemed a little iffy and downtown was a bit too far away for a comfortable walk. Although our beautiful four-bedroom Victorian—I had already begun to call it ours —was priced at $129, 000, the difference seemed small given all its advantages; it was so much larger, just eight or ten blocks from downtown, and in a much better neighborhood. Twenty years from now, I argued, that difference in price would seem like nothing. But the difference between the two houses would seem like everything.
Neither one of us slept that night. I dreamt about debt all night long. In my half-sleeping, half-waking state, I tried to calculate the mortgage payment, the property taxes, the insurance. I worried about whether we could rent it out during the time it would take us to get ready to move. I added up what we put into savings and retirement each month, wondering if we could scrape together the full payment if we had to. At some point during the night, Scott got up, thinking I was asleep, and went into the bathroom so he could turn on a light, page through the real estate magazines, and worry over it.
The next morning, with maybe four hours of sleep between us, we told the realtor we wanted to see the house again. We spent most of the morning looking it over. I took pictures of every room, Scott mapped out the house on a piece of paper, and we both tried to look for faults, sags, soft spots—anything that might change our minds before we made an offer. By the end of the day, we were sure of our decision. We went back to our realtor’s office to write up an offer, and somehow, miraculously, by five o’ clock we were on our way out of town, and our realtor was driving to the seller’s agent to deliver the offer. Six weeks later, we were homeowners. The people we bought the house from hadn’t found a new place yet, so we rented the house back to them and started getting ready to move.
BEING A HOMEOWNER changed the way I thought about the holidays, which, by this time, were only a few weeks away. In all the years we’d been together, Scott and I had never bought a Christmas tree. Either we couldn’t afford to go out and buy the tree, the stand, lights, and ornaments all at once, or we weren’t going to be home during the holidays, anyway, and it seemed like a waste. Our house always felt a little barren around Christmas as a result. But now that we owned a house, I wanted us to start having our own holiday traditions, as a couple, instead of relying on our families to supply that for us during the few days we spent with them each Christmas.
I knew that somewhere, maybe in the attic, we had a box of Christmas decorations. My aunt and uncle had sent a set of tin vegetable ornaments from Texas the year before, and Scott had brought a few ornaments home from an office Christmas party. I had strings of lights that I’d bought on sale after the holidays, and an assortment of stray bows, ribbons, and garlands that I’d saved from packages. We’d gone to Santa Fe on vacation and bought dried chile peppers and a gaudy tin star tree topper.
All those decorations sat in a box marked “Xmas,” waiting to be opened, while I mulled over what kind of tree I wanted. I didn’t bother consulting Scott about any of it. I knew that if I picked the right tree and just brought it home, I could get him in the spirit. I was still undecided when I pulled into San Lorenzo on my lunch hour one afternoon. The jumbo six-packs of annual flowers were all gone, and in their place, an assortment of Christmas trees, wreaths, and garlands. I was worried about how LeRoy would behave around a full-sized Chrismas tree. He would probably climb right to the top, and, if the tree could support his weight, he’d hang on with one paw and push ornaments off with another. I considered buying twenty or so feet of garland and just decorating a room or a couple of windows with it. Or maybe even just a wreath … then I found a display of two-foot-tall living dwarf pines, lined up in rows like a tiny Christmas tree farm. This tree grows very well in containers, the sign told me, and will stay small and perfectly cone shaped, year after year.
I chose the tallest dwarf Christmas tree I could find, one that towered a good four inches above the rest, along with a redwood planter and a few feet of pine and cedar garland to lay around its base. I took it home and it sat there for a few days until I had time to decorate it.
When I pulled out the box of decorations and started untangling the lights, Scott was sitting at the computer, as usual, doing some accounting for his book business. I didn’t say anything to him, but in a few minutes I heard Elvis’s “Blue Christmas” from the CD player and felt Scott standing beside me, pulling me toward the mistletoe I had just hung in the doorway. “This was a good idea,” he whispered, smiling at our little tree and the handful of decorations. “Maybe next year we’ll have Christmas in our very own house. What do you think?”
What do I think? It made a shiver run up the back of my neck, just thinking about it.
While Elvis crooned in the background, Scott untangled our string of lights and wrapped them around the tree, and we took turns hanging our seven or eight ornaments. When we were finished, I wired the star to the top of the tree. It was a little heavy for such a tiny tree, but it held up.
At night, with the lights plugged in, our tree was the finest first tree anyone ever had. It looked like the kind of tree we would have bought when we were first dating, back in our starving graduate-student days. We could have bought a huge tree, with all the trimmings, but it just seemed right to start out with this tiny creature, to bring it with us when we went to our new home, and to water it and watch it grow over the years.