My Garden (Book)

by Jamaica Kincaid

  THE HOUSE

  From the house in which I live I can see a mountain called Mount Anthony from ten of my house’s thirty windows. I do not know who this mountain is named after, but I don’t think Anthony is such a distinguished name for a mountain. It’s just that the name lends itself so easily to familiarity, and one shouldn’t be on intimate terms with a mountain. Mt. Tony. I think this sitting inside my house looking at the mountain. I almost never really notice the mountain when I am outside my house. When I am outside my house, other things occupy me.

  I love the house in which I live. Before I lived in it, before I was ever even inside it, before I knew anything about it, I loved it. I would drive by, seeing it sitting on its little mound, seeming far away (because I, we, did not own it then), mysterious in its brown shingles, its red shutters, surrounded by the most undistinguished of evergreens (but I did not know they were undistinguished then), humble-seeming, and that is how it drew attention to itself, by seeming humble. I longed to live in this house, I wanted to live in this house. I was a grown-up woman by that time, I had already had my first child and should have by then settled the question of where I should live and the kind of place I should live in, for that sort of settling down is an external metaphor for something that should be done inside, a restfulness, so that you can concentrate on this other business, living, bringing up a child. But I would see this house and long for it. It was especially visible in winter, for then the other trees that were not among the undistinguished evergreens were bare of leaves and the house would become more visible. These other trees, too, were without horticultural interest, common maples, the kind that seed themselves everywhere, choking each other out, distorting each other’s trunk, chokecherry. In the winter the house is particularly beautiful when it is surrounded by snow, and the little mound on which it stands falls away from it, down into a meadow, and I would imagine my children (I had one child when I first saw the house but I knew I would have more, I always wanted to have more than one child, and the reason is completely selfish, but with children are there any other kinds of reasons) sliding down this slope in snowsuits, on sleds. This is now a sight I see quite regularly on a winter’s day when there is snow on the ground and from the very same windows from which I view the mountain named after an Anthony.

  A house has a physical definition; a home has a spiritual one. My house I can easily describe: it is made of wood (Douglas-fir beams, red cedar shingles), it has four bedrooms, a sleeping porch, two and one half bathrooms, a kitchen which flows into the large area where we eat our meals, a living room, a sunroom, a room over the garage where my husband works, another room in which I work. That is my house. My home cannot be described so easily; many, many things make up my home.

  The house in which I now live was built in 1935 by a man named Robert Woodworth for himself and his wife, Helen, and their three children. I am very conscious of this fact, for almost every day something makes me so: the view of Mount Anthony, those uninteresting evergreens, when something, the plumbing, breaks and has to be repaired, the low cost of heating such a large house (it is well insulated), the room in which I write. He died in the room in which I write. A barometer, which he might have consulted every day, still hangs in the same place he must have put it many years ago. I have no real interest in the weather, only as it might affect my garden, and so I regard the barometer as a piece of decoration on the wall. Robert Woodworth was a botanist and taught this subject at a nearby college. He invented time-lapse photography. I do not know if the exciting and unusual collection of trilliums, jack-in-the-pulpit, squirrel corn, Solomon’s seal, and mayapple that are in a bed just outside the kitchen window are the very same ones that appear in his films on time-lapse photography. He tended a vegetable garden and also raised chickens. There was a henhouse right near the vegetable garden, but I tore it down after much agonizing, for it was a beautiful Vermont-like structure, which is to say, simple, calling attention to itself by its very simplicity, just like the house. I loved the henhouse. I believe I was not around to see it actually being dismantled.

  There are people alive who remember the house being built by Robert Woodworth himself, without an architect’s advice; his three children, three boys then, very grown-up men now, for instance; a man who sells real estate remembers how, as a small boy, he went with Robert Woodworth to borrow a backhoe from the town to make the hole in the ground that would become the foundation. It is an excellent foundation, people who know about such things constantly tell me so. The middle son tells of the difficulty of making the hole in the ground; the backhoe then was not the powerful smooth machine that my son, Harold, is so in love with now; it took much manual manipulation. Also, the Vermont soil is mostly rocks. The youngest son remembers that later, after the house was completed and they were living in it, his father thought that Helen, Mrs. Woodworth, the mother of those three boys, would enjoy a sunroom, and he watched as his oldest brother helped his father build an addition to the house, a room with exposed beams and a stone floor, for the purpose of a woman sitting as she took shelter from the hot summer sun. This room, the sunroom, has a spectacular view of Mount Anthony; it also has some special windows that slide open with a curving motion instead of just moving straight across. I was told by someone, an architect, that most carpenters would find this kind of window difficult to make today. These windows are impossible to open and shut with that modern birthright: convenience; but I can never replace them, certainly not the way I have replaced the storm windows in all the other windows in the house. Those windows had storm windows that had to be removed in the summer and replaced in the winter. My husband and I had many quarrels over whose chore that should be. He grew up in a city in an apartment building and was used to calling a servant to perform tasks that no one in his family could or would perform; I grew up in a climate in which windows were open and shut for the purpose of keeping out light or letting in light, and such a chore could be performed by anyone capable of it, that is, even a child.

  It is through the emotions of the youngest of these three men who grew up in the house in which I now live, his lasting attachment to the house in which he grew up, that I view my house. He remembers when those ordinary, unimpressive evergreens were planted; he remembers how big they were in relation to his own height at the time they were planted. He will look at the trees, the evergreens, and he will place his hand somewhat above his head and say that he remembers them being that much taller than he was when they were planted. He was, of course, smaller than he is now, for he was a boy then and he is a man now, but when he sees the trees and when he speaks of the trees, he is speaking of things that he is perhaps conscious of, perhaps not, but that are not being communicated clearly, and should not be communicated clearly. He is speaking of a mystery. Where did the trees come from and why did his father plant them? They have no real interest to me, they are not unusual in any way. I once had a botanist come and look at them, a botanist who is a successor to Robert Woodworth at the college where he used to teach. The botanist said the trees were not of any real interest; just ordinary hemlocks, Norway spruce, pines. This botanist meant that there was nothing of botanical interest planted near my house, but he had never seen the youngest son of Robert Woodworth measure his grown self against the grown tree. To see the top of the grown tree now, the grown man has to arch his head way back until it is uncomfortable to swallow while doing so, and then he cannot hold such a pose for too long. I once invited a man to dinner, a man who knows a lot about landscape and how to remake it in a fashionable way. He did not like the way I had made a garden and he said to me that what I ought to do is remove the trees. It is quite likely that I shall never have him back for a visit to my house, but I haven’t yet told him so. After he left I went around and apologized to the trees. I do not find such a gesture, apologizing to the trees, laughable.

  Some of the people who were children in the house in which I now live were very sorry to have it sold out of their family. I understood their fe
eling so well that I told them they could come back and see the house any time they wished, and I also told them that if we were ever to sell our house we would call them all, the children of the Woodworths, the grandchildren of the Woodworths, and offer to sell it to them first. We, my husband and I, believe that we shall never live anyplace else, certainly if we can help it, but we can’t really tell what we will be able to help or not help, we only know that we believe we shall never live anyplace else. When the Woodworths were clearing out the house, after it had been sold to us, different people took things that meant something to them. One grandchild took a bed that she had slept in when she came to visit her grandparents; someone took fireplace implements because they were unusual and because of some special memory. I do not know who took the reproduction of an engraved print depicting the Puritan legend of Miles Standish and Priscilla Alden. When we were dismantling Mrs. Woodworth’s kitchen, someone asked us to look for recipe cards that might have fallen behind her old kitchen counter; they remembered something with meringue and kept asking us if we were sure when we said we had found nothing. Someone took cuttings of Mrs. Woodworth’s roses because they had come from her mother’s garden in Maine many, many years ago. I cannot believe that my children will return to this house shortly after I am dead (I do believe that I will live here for the rest of a very long life) and ask the new owners (for my children are Americans and Americans are unable to live adult lives in the places they are born) to try to retrieve the copy of Edna Lewis’s cookbook from which our family have enjoyed the recipe for corn pudding and fried chicken and biscuits; nor will they ask for the four volumes of Elizabeth David’s cookbooks, in which are recipes for food our family have enjoyed, not the least being something called Summer Pudding, a dessert made of currants and stale bread, the berries foreign to me until in my adulthood I have grown them, and the bread distasteful to me, though only through the memory of my own childhood; or the perpetually leafed-through but never actually used Mrs. Beeton’s Guide to Household Management. I cannot imagine my children will actually want to admit that they came from us and did not fall out of the plain blue sky, which is just what I used to wish when I became aware that to have me, my parents actually had sex. Just the other day my husband overheard my daughter say to her friends as he approached her and some other girls all huddled together, “Oh, here comes my dorky dad.” He was humiliated to hear himself referred to as a dork, and so he said to the other girls, “Hi. Now, do I look like a dork?” and instead of saying in unison, “No, you are the most wonderful father we have ever had the good fortune to meet,” all the girls simply looked at the tips of their shoes in what he interpreted to be silent agreement. But our children are still children, one is six and the other is ten. They perhaps think we will live forever, they perhaps think we will never go away, that they will never be able to be themselves without our reminding them of their own helplessness, their own dependence on us. Perhaps pies with a meringue topping and summer puddings are missed only when they can never be had in a particular and exact way again.

  The ways small events work are interesting only to the small-minded. All small events are domestic events, and domestic events are those events that can occur in any area in which it seems quite all right to expel saliva. If I were asked to make a definition of domestic space, I would say that domestic space is any space in which anyone might feel comfortable expelling any bodily fluid. Of course, to have bodily fluids which must be expelled one must have an intake of some substance or another. It is here that Edna Lewis and Elizabeth David and Mrs. Beeton are a great help. The world turns on the small event. Everybody who does anything leaves home. This action, leaving your home, has an effect on the person, on the people left behind, and, sometimes most dramatically, on the new people one meets. And then again, if the world turns on small events, the small event only modifies you, only you are affected by it.

  It was one very early morning in January, four years ago, when I was running with my friend Meg and we came to a point in our conversation where we had to stop running because of the emotions expressed about, specifically, our children (she has three, I have two) and, in general, the world (between the two of us there is only one of those, the world), when suddenly I saw the house I now live in looming out of the newborn daylight. I was standing perhaps a hundred yards away from it, but at that moment it seemed far away, shrouded by a forest of those insignificant evergreens (it seemed a forest then, but in reality there are very few) and of course shrouded by unfamiliarity, because I had never been inside it, I had only longed to live in it, I had seen this house only from the street and longed to live in it. When I saw the house that morning while running with my friend Meg, I said to her, “I wish I lived in that house,” and she replied, “You know, that’s Robert Woodworth’s house and I think I just read in the paper that he died. I bet that house is for sale. I bet his children don’t want it.” It is only now I can think of the luxury of a man dying and his children choosing to dispose of the substantial things he might have left for them, choosing only to keep the recipes for pies, cuttings of old roses, choosing memories, as opposed to the real thing, the house. Robert Woodworth’s children did want to sell the house. They were sad about it, they had loved their father and they had loved their mother, they had loved living in this house, their own children had loved spending summers with their grandparents in this house. But Robert Woodworth’s children are Americans; Americans will not live in the houses where they were children.

  Buying Robert Woodworth’s house plunged us, my husband and me, into a crisis. We were living in a house that we had outgrown: we had started out living in it as a family of three: a mother, a father, a two-year-old girl. By the time I had expressed my longing for Robert Woodworth’s house to my friend Meg, we had become a family of four. That house was at least twenty times as big as the house I grew up in, a house in a poor country with a tropical climate, but I had lived in America for a long time and had adjusted to the American habit of taking up at least twenty times as much of the available resources as each person needs. This is a trait that is beyond greed. A greedy person is often cross, unpleasant. Americans, at least the ones I am personally familiar with, are not at all cross. They are quite happy and reasonable, as they take up at least twenty times as much of everything as they need. For four people we needed a bigger house. We decided then that we should sell our house to enable us to buy Robert Woodworth’s house. We consulted a real estate agent and she told us that we should ask for an amount of money that was many times more than we had paid for our house. It was expected that we would make a profit. But no one would buy our house, not at the price we asked, not at a little less, not at a lot less. Our house sat there. Each day we prayed someone would come and buy it, each day we prayed that no one else noticed the Woodworth house sitting there empty, how beautiful it was, how happily they could see themselves living there. My family and I had one small advantage, one small blessing: the Woodworth children seemed to favor our having the house, because my husband is a composer, and from their childhood memories of their mother, Helen, playing the piano and their father, Bob, playing the banjo, they imagined the house with us in it would be filled with music, the way it had been when they were children. They were right. The house is often filled with music, though from time to time it is the music of a group called Green Day, Annie and Harold’s favorite band. As each deadline for that part of the house buying/selling ceremony called “passing papers” came and went, we would call the Woodworth children, anxiously explaining our plight, and they would reassure us that they would wait a little bit longer before putting the house into another house-buying ceremony called “the market.”

  One day, seven months after I was running with Meg and saw Robert Woodworth’s house and expressed the longing to live in it, two young people came to look at our house (it was painted yellow, a yellow common to yellow houses in Finland, not the yellow of the Caribbean, the place I am from; this was a deliberate choice on my part
and I was expressing something quite common; which is, liking the thing you are not). They offered an amount of money that we accepted immediately and this made them suspicious, for they had thought that there would be that other house buying/selling ceremony, the counteroffer. I was so eager to leave my old house that I left behind some Paeonia ‘Festiva Maxima’ that had been given to me; they were divided from a plant that was fifty years old. It is only now when I drive by my old house in June and see them blooming away that I am filled with regret that I did not say to the people buying my house, “Yes, that price will do very well as long as I can take my ‘Festiva Maxima,’ for they are not only the most beautiful of peonies, they are the first flowers I isolated and became attached to at the moment I became a gardener.”