Enchanted Garden

We brought my mom to her friend’s house to pick up some plant stems used in fake floral arrangements. We thought it might be a bagful, but it turned out to be a box the size of a small child.

Their home was bare in some rooms, stacked high with boxes in others, a for sale sign espousing the 4br/1.5 bath for $480K stood in front. My mother’s friend was retiring and they decided to move back to the Philippines. A container would be brought to their home in a couple of weeks and they would fill it with everything they wanted to bring home: furniture, albums, clothes.

They had been flip-flopping on what their plan was. Keep the house just go back and forth. Sell the house and move to something smaller and go back and forth or sell the home and build a home in the Philippines. They had been delaying for months constantly extending their departure dates. They extended it this time so they could attend our wedding, a last hurrah with the rest of my mother’s friends, most of them accountants that keep the City of Oakland’s books in check.

Along with her accounting day job, she made fake flower arrangements that they would sell at the local flea market. This small petite woman with black hair with wisps of white in the corners battled through the stacks of boxes in the garage in search for the “greens” she was going to give my mother, all the while telling us about the garage sale where they only got pennies on the dollar for the stuff they had, so undervalued and how little time they had between the packing, and work (she decided to work practically til their departure date and how packing just makes them cry, too many memories.

Then there is the red tape in immigrating back, an issue of citizenship. She has opted for dual citizenship, her husband has not, a man of his word I suppose. Only one of them needs to be a Philippine citizen in one form or another.

After we found the box, she brought us to the backyard to pick some fruit. At first it’s this shaded lattice fenced courtyard, then you walk down the loose stone path to the small grotto with several angel statues, go down around the back again and find a vegetable garden and further still a cove of fruit trees: mulberry who dried remnants blended into the gravel, the apple, asian pear and persimmon trees she asked her husband to buy her instead of an expensive dinner on the Bay, the bricks around those trees were laid in a heart, and of course kalamansi. They even had grape vines! The grape vines draped over a lattice canopy a few bunches till hanging through the lattice. “Imagine,” she says, “when they are all ripe this whole thing, grapes hanging. Organic too, we don’t use pesticides.

Even my mother who had gone to this home for many a party never realized the garden when this far back. They managed to find a couple of large stray bunches hiding at the edge of the fence. It was like the Secret Garden that created lovely refuge from the usually stinging heat of the inland valley.

This apple trees she explains didn’t give fruit for 5 years. It was tilting, blocking one of the paths. Her husband was going to cut it down. She told the tree, “You see, you haven’t produced anything. My husband is going to cut you down. I hope you can produce a miracle.” The next season it grew 10 apples the size of grapefruits. They didn’t cut it down, just added rope supports to keep it from falling.

She sighed a bit seeing how they have “let it go” with no time to trim the trees properly.

Pots of Jade plants were everywhere. She said she got the first cutting from my mother, who cut it from the Jade plant that had been left behind when we first moved into our home. There must have been 30 Jade plants. She gave us another style of Jade plant and another kind of spider plant that grows yellow flowers which she too got as a cutting from my mother. Before reaching the car, we ended up with 7-8 potted plants including several pots of aloe, again all grown from one plant.

Life simply multiplies from her hands. No wonder she doesn’t look 67.

They are going back because all her family is there. Her family has a compound with a house set aside for her. She arrived in this country 18 years ago, moved into this home 13 years ago. Maybe if she hadn’t gotten passed over for promotion and raises so many times she might have considered staying. Even then, with the apples ripening and the grapes abundant, a yard that started out empty now full of life, it’s still hard for her to pick up her roots.

It is said to think that the new owners may simply tear down the trees they’ve left behind, but not everyone has a green thumb.

But it was clear to me, for this woman it didn’t matter where she lived, they could do all of this again: create a home so abundant, a place of shelter from the heat and sun, a place of memories.