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

reached our small house, the three of us walked in. The house stood behind the lawn where my parents had been married just a few years before, my father wearing his favorite leather boots, my mother with flowers in her hair. The smooth grass sloped toward the sea. My rope swing hung from the eucalyptus tree nearby; my little red tricycle stood in the driveway. My father had attached wooden blocks to the pedals because my legs weren’t yet long enough to reach.
    Inside the house there were wine bottles everywhere, the remnants of two weeks of partying and sex. While we had been gone, my father had taken this woman into our home and made it their love nest. A few minutes later my father walked out alone. Our family was finished. In the ways that really matter, my childhood was over.
    We had to move, quickly. Our small cottage was on the grounds of the retreat center where my father was on staff, the housing tied to his job. But he had decided not to be a father; we couldn’t live there any longer.
    One day soon after, my mother drove up to San Francisco to look for a house for us. As we drove back down the windingcoastal highway after a long day of searching, she gripped the steering wheel, white-knuckled with fear for our future and the baby she carried. Trying to keep it together. Trying to keep it in.
    I was in a booster seat next to her, just two years old. I don’t remember that day, but I’ve heard the story. As we drove the tortuous coast highway, twisting our way between a rocky cliff face on one side and a sheer drop to the ocean below on the other, my mother says I looked at her.
    “Cry, Mommy,” I told her.
“Just cry.”
    —
    My mother has never subscribed to graceful gardens of flowers; she wanted to grow food. Vegetables. Lots of them.
    “I’m going to grow kale all winter long,” she said in delight when she first saw Orchard House’s run-down greenhouse. “It’s going to be my green gold.”
    That spring, however, she was focused on lettuces: tiny shoots of green and red. My favorite was Flashy Trout Back—a speckled variety—which I loved for the name alone. There were other greens as well: mizuna, pak choi, arugula. It was all about the greens.
    My interests lay in food as well, but not in the same way. I wanted flavor. I wanted an abundance of it. I wanted to make grand and generous meals. I wanted to have a garden to cook from.
    I had started cooking young, learning from our babysitter Lorraine, who took the squishy plums that fell on the ground and made them into jam. She turned cabbage and cucumbers into pickles. I found it fascinating.
    Soon I was reading cookbooks, experimenting with recipes. We moved away from the country when I was eleven. My new school was close enough to ride my bike there, and my mothernow had her office in the downstairs of our house, so we no longer needed babysitters. That’s when I started cooking for real. My mother worked late, and I liked the feeling of making dinner, of providing for our family in this small way. When I went to sleep at night, I often left a plate of food in the kitchen for her to eat when she was done.
    Soon I was giving her shopping lists of things I needed for dinner. Sometimes she gave me money and dropped me off at the grocery store. Once I could drive, I went on my own.
    My mother was supportive of my cooking experimentation, but she didn’t understand it. For her, food had always been about health and nutrition. It never occurred to her that making dinner could be fun, that sitting down to a meal was pleasurable.
    “I don’t get cooking,” she said. “You put all this effort into making something—and ten minutes later,
poof
, it’s gone!”
    But food is about pleasure, coming together, sitting down, relaxing; it’s about enjoyment and nurturing yourself and others. I’m not surprised my mother does not understand this. None of these words are part of her active vocabulary.
    Over the years, however, I learned to cook for her,