Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow Read Online Free PDF Page A

scared, unable to commit, unable to walk away. I couldn’t understand how this connection that felt like home could, at the same time, feel so unstable, so scary. Perhaps I did not remember how unstable my own home had been. I learned early to deal with crisis: I coped, I white-knuckled it. How do you walk away when the person you love is drowning?
    The eventual dissolution left me dizzy with grief and guilt. I
had
walked away, but not because I wanted to. The end haddamaged us both beyond repair. I found myself blinking in disbelief at an open blue sky. How was it possible we wouldn’t grow old together?
    I had been replaced, immediately—a new relationship to plug the gaping wound left by the old—but even there lines were not drawn clearly. There were late-night drunken messages left on my phone, offers of forgiveness, second chances if I wanted to come back. Things lingered on, erupting at unexpected moments.
    In the back of my head, even I thought it might still work out—at some distant time in the future when we were both more healed. If it’s meant to be, I told myself, maybe it still will be. It was what I needed to believe.
    That day, sitting on a Seattle street corner, I heard the news: They were expecting a baby, due in the fall. The life we had talked about would now be lived with someone else.
    It didn’t hit me until later in the afternoon, as I was standing amid racks of plants at a local nursery. I didn’t know what to do with this grief, this thing that made me question all my decisions. Surely they must all have been wrong to bring me to this place of sadness and loss. I put sunglasses on to hide my tears. I longed for exhaustion, to sleep like the dead, anything not to feel the roil of my own emotions.
    Instead I bought plants. I loaded my cart with three different types of tomatoes, basil, arugula, and chard. I took them home and planted them as the day grew gray and it began to rain. I stomped my shovel into the earth and piled the dirt high, worms burrowing to get away from the disturbance. Then I settled the plants in with a grim face, patting the soil around them until I dropped my trowel and sat on the stairs and wept.
    The shock of it made me feel like I was drowning in cold water, like it was hard to breathe. I cried into my gardening gloves and smeared dirt on my face. The future I had held on to would not be mine, and I was left wondering what the shape ofmy life would be. Suddenly the slate felt blank and foreboding; the only thing I could focus on was the plants.
    My tomatoes would not cure the pain or make me feel less lost, but it was the best I could do on a dark day when the Seattle skies cried along with me. Putting a plant in the ground is an investment in the future—even if that future is only tomato season a few months away. You are saying you think you’ll be around to water those plants, to eat their yield, to enjoy what they may produce. In the midst of uncertainty, it is an act of faith.
    That day I planted hope, tender and green.

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A CITY OF GARDENS
    I HADN’T HEARD OF the Boeing Bust until I moved to Seattle, but I soon learned the details. In the late sixties, with government spending on the Vietnam War and the Apollo space program drying up, Boeing found itself heavily leveraged. The aerospace company was the largest employer in the area, and the resulting layoffs devastated the local economy, leaving Seattle with the highest unemployment rate in the country. Tens of thousands lost their jobs; so many people fled the city that local U-Haul dealerships ran out of trailers. A billboard was put up near the airport that read WILL THE LAST PERSON LEAVING SEATTLE TURN OUT THE LIGHTS . Dark humor for darker times.
    This was also the era of the back-to-the-land movement, across the country. These two forces inspired a young student at the University of Washington to action. In the midst of economic woes and environmental concerns, Darlyn Rundberg DelBoca decided