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

were settlers, bringing the saplings and seeds from our old home to the new one, even if this new home did not require a sea voyage or months in a covered wagon.
    “Sure.” My mother looked up briefly from her work. She had abandoned the rake for a moment to cut back a tree branch that was leaning over the vegetable bed, blocking the path. We didn’t know if the tree in question was viable—it looked like a cherry but had no blossoms that spring. Despite our shared cynical nature, we were holding out hope.
    My mother took the heavy loppers and reached over her head to grasp the branch between twin blades. Standing below, she had little leverage, yet she kept trying to bear down with enough force to sever it. Trying and failing.
    “Here, let me do that for you.” I was taller, stronger, just standing there. Why hadn’t she asked for help?
    “I can do it,” she said gruffly, scissoring the handles again, trying to make the dull blades cut through the branch. Still, nothing.
    I put my hand on the loppers. “Really, Mom—I can do it.” I stood over her, holding the handle, not letting go.
    Finally she released her grip and stepped back. From where I stood on the slight embankment, the branch was level with my shoulder. Bracing one handle against my waist, I pulled the other toward me with both hands and took the branch off with one try.
    Not for the first time, I wondered: Did she think we kids didn’t know how to do things, or was she just unused to having any help at all?
    —
    In the early days of my childhood, my mother went to see a psychic. Or perhaps it was an astrologer or someone who readauras. It’s hard to say. The stories I’ve heard from the days before I can remember have a fantastical feel to them. As if the cloud of incense and marijuana smoke hanging over Northern California in the early seventies resulted in a state of magic realism: Things don’t always make sense.
    In the story I am with my mother, no more than two years old. My brother had not yet been born. Perhaps it was before my father left—when my mother was pregnant and worried about the stability of her marriage. Or maybe it was afterward, when she was panicked and looking for answers. I don’t know.
    What I know is what she has told me: that there were books and toys in the corner of the office and I went to play with them.
    The woman gestured to the back of my small blond head.
    “You know the two of you have been together in many lifetimes,” she said.
    “Really?” My mother was surprised.
    “Oh, yes,” the woman continued. “You’ve spent many incarnations together. Sometimes you were her mother—and sometimes she was yours.”
    My mother says I was playing in the corner, not paying attention, but the moment the woman said that, I nodded my head. I didn’t turn around, I didn’t say anything. I just nodded. As if I had known all along.
    I don’t know what to make of this story. It seems part of that magic realism of my early childhood: reincarnation and enlightenment and free sex and the Summer of Love. That I had been my mother’s mother? That we had been linked together for lifetime after lifetime? I’m not sure I believe any of it.
    What I do know is this—perhaps the only thing I need to know.
    It
feels
true.
    —
    What I call magic realism other people called freedom. They called it
following your bliss
. The early seventies were a ferment of it, particularly in Northern California.
    In the case of my father, bliss took the form of a dark-haired woman who had come to the coast looking for her own freedom. It was said she’d left a husband and children behind. Perhaps, like my father, she hadn’t wanted the responsibility of family.
    My mother, already pregnant with my brother, had taken me to New York. When we flew back, my father met us at the airport and we set off on the long drive down the rocky coast to Big Sur, where we lived. I was two years old. My mother says I sang the entire way home.
    When we