Orchard House Quotes

“Sometimes home has nothing to do with family or even with love; sometimes home is simply the place where you feel safe.”
― Tara Austen Weaver, Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow

“As Annie Dillard wrote: "We have less time than we knew."

I wanted my mother to understand that I didn't plan picnics and parties because life was perfect and easy—I planned them because it wasn't. I planned them because my friend had died, because another friend's father had been diagnosed with cancer, because none of us knew what the future held. I planned them because, on the long, difficult slog up the mountain, it's important to stop and look at the view. I planned them because what is all the work for if you cannot gather the people you love around you in a golden sunset and laugh together? I planned them because winter was coming and we needed warm memories to sustain us.

We have less time than we knew. I understood that now.”
― Tara Austen Weaver, Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow

“In the garden of my childhood my mother grew corn and asparagus, beans, zucchini, and more, but the thing I remember most is the cherry tomatoes, bushy in their cages, the leaves slightly sticky, funny smelling. My mother wore long-sleeve shirts to weed the tomatoes.

I remember her plucking them off the bush, my brother and me opening our mouths like baby birds for her to pop them in. I closed my eyes to experience the exact moment my teeth pierced the smooth skin and the tomato exploded in a burst of acid sweet, the seeds slightly bitter in their jelly pouches. The sensation was so unexpected each time it happened that my eyes flew open. And there was my mother, smiling at me. That is what I remember.

My mother did not smile often. We have pictures where she is smiling, me or my brother nestled on her lap. You can tell she loves us. Her body language shows it. But mostly we knew she loved us because of how hard she worked for us. Usually elsewhere.

But the garden—the garden was her project. In the little time she had not devoted to work and cleaning and trying to hold her small world together, my mother grew food.

My brother and I didn't help in the garden, but we were usually playing nearby. We always wanted to be nearby when she was home. I remember her letting us crawl through the dried cornstalks after the ears had been harvested. I remember running my hands through the asparagus that had been allowed to go to seed. I remember eating plums from the old tree that lived in the corner of the yard. I remember her feeding us tomatoes fresh off the vine and still warm from the sun.

When I think of those tomatoes, it is not the flavor that moves me. They were shockingly sweet and tangy, but that is not what I remember the most. It is not what I yearned for.

Eating cherry tomatoes meant my mother was home; it meant she was smiling at me.”
― Tara Austen Weaver, Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow

“Sometimes a kitchen-table chat with a friend is exactly what you need to soothe the barbs of the day. We all have our small but significant heartbreaks. We all need help in hard times. But sometimes help works in mysterious ways. I might have been helping my friend, bu she was helping me just as much.

That is the mark of a good friendship, I thought . . . . When you each give all you have and you both think you are getting the better deal; when walking through the door of a house that is not your own feels like coming home.”
― Tara Austen Weaver, Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow

“When you are not in a position of power over your own destiny, when the quality and shape of your days are dependent on the favor of others, you become sensitive; you become savvy. You learn to soothe and coddle, influence and meddle, all under the radar. Call it female intuition, call it outright manipulation, call it womanly wiles if you like. I call it survival.”
― Tara Austen Weaver, Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow

“I was coming to realize that trying to do everything meant not doing anything terribly well. It was time to make choices. What in my life had become deadwood? As painful as it sometimes might be, perhaps a quick snip was better. Sometimes you have to cut things back in order to grow.”
― Tara Austen Weaver, Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow

“Kate McDermott taught pie making around the world; I had taken her class several years before. It hadn't made me a baker, but it had given me some perspective on the art of pies. Mostly I had been taken by her attitude.

"I make ugly pies," she told me. "They don't have to look perfect."

That day Kate had ably patched ripped piecrust, shoring up weak spots where the dough had been rolled too thin. She didn't think it needed to be perfect. "Just fix any mistakes you make," she said without concern. "It doesn't matter."

Kate's approach was breezy and relaxed. She barely followed a recipe. "See how it feels," she told me. "Trust yourself." As I ran my hands through the butter cut into flour, I felt emboldened. Things didn't have to be perfect. Kate seemed at peace with imperfections, her pies beautiful in their rustic uniqueness, no two ever the same.

Perhaps the secret was finding comfort in the way things were: a process of accepting rather than hiding.

The irony was that I liked it when other people let me see them as they truly were: less-than-perfect houses, disordered garages, overdue library books. The imperfections in my friends' lives didn't make me like them any less—they made me like them more. I felt more comfortable with the flaws in my own life, more intimately connected to them; it made me feel like family.

I knew this intellectually, but it was harder to apply. I might be able to appreciate rustic charm in a pie, to enjoy the comfortable clutter of a friend's house, but I held myself to a higher standard—one I never managed to achieve. I just couldn't give myself that same compassion.

But rolling out and patching the rips in my pie dough that afternoon, as Kate had shown me, I began to wonder if there might not be another way. And when I pulled the pie out of the oven, bumpy, irregular, burnished and glossy and smelling like raspberry heaven, for a moment I thought it was beautiful. My beautifully imperfect pie.”
― Tara Austen Weaver, Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow

“Sometimes I wondered if my mother's unconventional choices were her billboard to a cruel world: I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU THINK OF ME. Had she chosen to walk away, or did she withdraw early to avoid failure? Were my mother's eccentricities a strength or just the way she covered up her own vulnerabilities? I knew from my own life that it's easier to pretend you don't want the thing you cannot have.

I feared rejection as well. The isolation and lack of communication I had been raised with made me feel—not that I was doing things wrong, but that I was wrong. I feared opening up by home would reveal all my messy, broken bits, all the ways I continually failed. If anyone got close enough to see, I was sure they wouldn't want to know me.

After years of shutting people out, how could I possibly let them in?”
― Tara Austen Weaver, Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow

“My mother wasn't there to comfort me—she had rarely been able to give me what I needed. But here was a garden of vegetables she had worked hard to grow. Now, when I needed it most, she was nourishing me. She couldn't give me herself. Instead she had given me the tools to be strong on my own. Perhaps that was her greatest gift to me: resilience and strength, the ability to survive.

Maybe this is how my mother loves me. Maybe this is the best she can do.”
― Tara Austen Weaver, Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow

“It is hard to comfort yourself when you feel miserable. Comfort requires something from the outside.”
― Tara Austen Weaver, Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow

“It is not in my nature to see what is not there. I've never felt like I could create a new reality—I was too busy trying to make the pieces I had been given fit together. It didn't occur to me that I could walk away and start from scratch.

To create takes more than imagination. There is an audacity to creation, whether you are designing a new house, a new life, or a new garden bed. There must be an overriding belief in your own worth—and in a world benevolent enough to make room for your vision. To be able to create, you need to have faith.

I do not come from people who have faith. I come from people who expect to be wiped out in a freak snowstorm in July.

And yet, looking around this bedraggled side yard, I tried to imagine what it might look like. I mustered up all I had, and I began to dream and make plans.”
― Tara Austen Weaver, Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow

“In those days, when my mother visited Seattle to see her grandchildren, she brought books. On the inside cover she always inscribed the same message. It was what she told the girls on the phone from California . . . Grandma loves you all the time.

As the girls grew, they learned to parrot my mother, they said it together at the end of phone conversations or when she was leaving after a visit. Their high, chirpy voices blended with her own low tones to make a chant, a chorus, a call to arms. She would start and they would join in: "Grandma loves you all the time."

They thought it was a game, a joke. Only I knew the sad, scared place it came from. Only I knew what it really meant: a little girl with a single memory of her own mother. A little girl who did not remember ever being loved.

Even if she is not here, even when you cannot see her, even if she dies, even if you don't remember her: Grandma loves you all the time.”
― Tara Austen Weaver, Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow

“So . . . " I began with some trepidation. "Did you have an okay time?" My mother is not once to mince words. She is not one to pretend. And I would never ask if something had been good. Good is more than I ever hope for with my mother.

"I guess it wasn't too terrible," she allowed.

In a world of broken glasses, in the world my mother inhabits, this is almost praise.

I thought back on all the laughter, the spring flowers, the hula-hooping, the girls. I didn't know what she was waiting for—a personal hallelujah chorus? Couldn't she just be happy for once? There wasn't much time left.

"You might want to try enjoying it," I told her. "This might be as good as it gets.”
― Tara Austen Weaver, Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow

“Why do you think you get along so well?" I once asked my friend Paul's sister . . . . Michelle thought for a moment before answering my question, but not for long.

"It all goes back to when Paul was in his coma, " she said. "We realized how easy it would be to lose him and decided not to sweat the small stuff. Life is too short.”
― Tara Austen Weaver, Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow

“It was years before I realized the sort of sadness my mother had couldn't be taken away by a new scarf or a piece of jewelry. The sadness my mother had was in her bones; it would never be vanquished, no matter how hard I tried to be happy for both of us. There was nothing I could purchase or do or even cook that would change things. Life had fundamentally let her down, it seemed, and the shade of that disappointment colored everything. There was nothing I could do to fix that.”
― Tara Austen Weaver, Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow

“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 trusted often died. Only the crafty and cynical made it out alive. Who am I to say where the line should be drawn?”
― Tara Austen Weaver, Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow

“My mother would come home late a night, tired after a long day of teaching or clients, and look around for what wasn't working. With the final bit of energy she had, she fixed problems. Sometimes she yelled in frustration or anger. There was no time to enjoy what might be going on.

Even today, my mother scans for problems. If something is done there is no acknowledgement, thanks, or 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 battle field.

It's efficient, but it's a hard way to live. It's almost impossible to live with.”
― Tara Austen Weaver, Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow

“Bringing back a long-neglected patch of earth is no easy feat. On the days I came to Orchard House, I never knew where to start. The scale of all that needed to be done was overwhelming; it was tempting to just stand there and gawk. My urge was always to run away, or to take a nap. In the face of insurmountable, my instinct is to not even try.

My mother is built of sterner stuff. Because she expects the worst, perhaps, she jumps in swinging.”
― Tara Austen Weaver, Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow