The Fruit Tree Orchard

In 1972, Elaine and I bought our very first house, in Rodeo, California. That’s across the bay from San Francisco. It was a small house, but it was a pretty house, and it was well built by the architect from whom we bought it. At the time, it was less than six months old, and the architect who built in it was living in it when he sold it to us. Elaine and I planned to live there for the next several years, so we bought gardening and landscaping books and spent hours and hours planning and reading. We planted decorative trees in front; for example, a flowering crabapple tree. We dedicated the large back yard to fruit trees. We planted trees for apples, peaches, plums, pears, nectarines, apricots, lemons and oranges, figs, cumquats, and I don’t know what all; I think even avocados. We also planted a vegetable garden, squash and tomatoes mainly.

I also designed and built, with the help of a friend of mine named Delbert, an elaborate multi-circuit sprinkler system that worked on timers. Next, Elaine and I planted the whole yard with Dichondra seeds and then pulled weeds by the thousands for months after they germinated. The end result was very satisfying, though. After we had lived there for about two years, things were beginning to look pretty nice, and we were feeling good about the result of our thousands of hours of hard work. But then late in 1974, I took a new job in El Paso, and we had to sell the house and move.

Eventually, after moving from El Paso to Washington, D. C. and then back to El Paso again, we wound up in Houston in 1985, and we have remained here ever since. For the last twenty years of my career, I was a private consultant, and on occasion I had to testify in court. In 1999, I had to go to San Francisco to testify in a trial. After the trial was over, I had the whole afternoon left before I had to return to Houston. I thought about driving out to see our first home, which I had not seen for twenty-five years, a quarter of a century. Then I thought again, and I said to myself that, given some of my past experiences in this sort of thing, no doubt the person who owned the house now, or maybe some owner before him, had long since uprooted or chopped down all the fruit trees that Elaine and I had planted with tender loving care so long ago. By going out there, all I would be doing is setting myself up for a major disappointment.

But I really did want to see the first house we had ever owned, and I eventually succumbed to my curiosity and drove out to Rodeo, while at the same time I was preparing myself for a bitter disappointment. When I got to the neighborhood, however, I immediately perked up when I saw that the flowering crabapple tree was still out there in front of the house. That was a good sign, the way I saw it. I drove up and down the street and around the neighborhood, before I finally got up the nerve to park the car at the street curb and go up and knock on the door.

A middle-aged man came to the door. I judged him to be probably my age plus or minus a few years. I said hello and told him my name and said that I was the original owner of his house, or well, almost the original owner. I said, for example, that I knew that the kitchen and dining rooms were on my left, the living room was right behind him, and the master bedroom was on the far right end at the back of the house. I told him he had a fireplace that opened out to the dining room on one side and the living-room on the other, which was unusual. I also told him that I knew he had a sundeck outside the master bedroom and a concrete patio running along the rest of the back of the house, and that the master bedroom, the living room, and the dining room all three opened out onto the sundeck or the patio through sliding glass doors. And, finally, I told him, unless some previous owner had cut them all down, he had an orchard of fruit trees in his back yard that my wife and I had planted a quarter of a century ago.

He grinned and stated that I had convinced him, and he asked me if I would like to see the back yard. Well, sure, of course! I said. I thought you’d never ask! I said. He invited me into the house, and nothing much that I could see had been changed in the kitchen, dining, and living room areas. Then he took me through one of the glass doors onto his patio and into the back yard. I was astonished. Indeed, I was surprised and delighted. No grass grew anywhere. That’s because all the fruit trees provided such dense shade. Most of them were bearing fruit, and the owner got a grocery bag and started picking plums and lemons and oranges and so on, and putting them in the bag, which he gave to me. I thanked the man for his kindness and took the bag home, where Elaine and I, at long last, got a taste of the fruits of our labors long-past.