Free Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow by Tara Austen Weaver

praise; done means one less thing to worry about. It’s the problems that draw her.Maybe she just needs to be useful. If something is going right, it’s no longer her concern. My mother’s spent her life in triage, as if on a battlefield.
    It’s efficient, but it’s a hard way to live. It’s almost impossible to live with.
    The truth is, there wasn’t much going right for my mother back in those early days. Her husband had left, she had no financial or emotional support, no family nearby to be of help. She was working hard to keep her head above water. Maybe life felt like a battlefield. Except she had these children, climbing trees, and making up games and songs, and growing like weeds. I wonder if she allowed herself to enjoy that. To enjoy us.
    Perhaps the story starts earlier than that. In Florida, where my grandfather moved with my mother and her newborn sister after their mother had died. The family had wanted to take the children away, to have them raised by one of my grandfather’s many siblings. He probably should have let them.
    My grandfather quickly remarried to keep the family intact, proposing within months of his first wife’s death, but the woman he chose was cruel. When my mother came home from school, her stepmother made her sit on a stool in the yard. She was not allowed to play or come into the house—not even to use the bathroom. She sat on a stool alone, clenching her thighs together to keep from wetting herself. She’d have gotten in even more trouble for that.
    When she was ten, my mother tried to run away. She set off out the front gate, and at the end of the block she turned right. At the end of that block, she turned right again. She wasn’t allowed to cross the street, so she soon found herself back at her own gate. She couldn’t run away because she wouldn’t disobey.
    She left home at seventeen, bound for New York. “If you ran away at sixteen,” she told me, “the cops would come after you. But if you ran away at seventeen, your family had to pay thepolice to track you down. I knew nobody was going to pay money to get me back.”
    I could probably go back further still. Back to ancestors who fled from oppression, who hid from armies, who survived on their wits. Perhaps my mother expects the worst because her people so often experienced it. My brother and I are the first generation to know privilege, to have opportunities and advantages. It seems ungrateful to complain.
    But what a cross to bear—to expect the worst, to wait for the sky to fall. All my life I had been told it wasn’t
if
the world would go to hell, just when. Tomorrow? Next week? It’s best to be prepared.
    I didn’t want to live like that. I wanted grace.
    And yet, I owed my existence to the fears that had made my ancestors suspicious. Those who were not scared became complacent. Those who trusted often died. Only the crafty and cynical made it out alive. Who am I to say where the line should be drawn?
    —
    The weedy dahlia bank my mother had cleared of rocks was going to be planted with vegetables. There were three planting beds, about ten feet long and five feet wide. Not that either of us had measured them. Preparation may be a family trait; precision is not.
    “What are you going to plant?” I asked my mother as she raked in soil amendments: fertilizer, compost, coffee grounds.
    “Kale.” I knew her one-word answer wasn’t meant to be brusque, even though it sounded that way.
    “I was thinking of planting raspberries against that back fence. Is that okay?” The fence lay behind the vegetable beds and marked the property line. “It will get nice sun almost all day long.”
    I planned to take cuttings from those first raspberries I brought from San Francisco, the small and sweet ones. I imaginedthem grown tall, full of ruby-colored fruit each June. I liked how this bit of California was following me, that the berries my nieces and I had been picking for three years now would be planted here too. We