Querencia

JANET SCHLICHT QUERENCIA

Like all seductions, the path that curves away from the main road is fraught with both promise and peril. When that detour also contrives to intersect in some way with the sacred stories of the past, a bit of extra caution may be in order. We sought no confrontation with the past, though; only the merest re-acquaintance. And so, lulled perhaps by the fine autumn day, we proceeded on our little jaunt. My mother held in her hand a scrap of paper with an address on it, and I turned the car off Interstate 5 toward Dark Hollow Road.

I should interject here that our family – I will put this in the mildest of terms – we were never really storytellers. I know that there are families that gather around under big oak trees on limpid summer afternoons, aunts and uncles and cousins, sipping lemonade and recalling tales of the past. In place of robust tales of love and hardship, our family seemed to have settled for a ragged and scanty collection of story fragments. Mostly, you had to put things together in your own mind, and there was never any knowing whether you came up with something like the truth.

That is at least part of what makes the story of the peach orchard such a treasure. It was one of the only stories that we told about ourselves. Like a precious gem sewn inside an old coat, we could take it out and admire its shine. Embedded in the story was the acknowledgement that “these are the people we come from.” This repertory of one seemed to be ample for us.

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Perhaps we simply did not need as much from our past as other people did.

And so, it was the peach orchard and the landscape of memory within it that drew us that day, further along Dark Hollow Road to the turn onto Vawter Road. The scrap of paper in my mother’s hand seemed to guide the way like a beacon. I think we both revisited the story as the road wound ahead of us. My grandparents had embarked on a daring adventure when they were both in their late fifties, and it began, as far as we know, with a letter. “Dear Phoebe,” Henry wrote in his careful hand, “I have found a place up here in Oregon. It is not much now. There is no plumbing or electricity, and the house is really just a shack. But I can build us a real home while we work the land and sell the peaches. It is truly beautiful up here, and the big sky opens wide over the orchard. Please say you will come with me.”

I imagine the still point of time when she opened that letter in her graceful Kansas City home, and what must have gone through her mind as she considered leaving behind all that was familiar for the rugged and uncertain. Whatever doubts or anxieties she may have had were not passed down to posterity. She said yes to Henry. She said goodbye to comfortable routines and set her mind to be happy and productive while inhabiting a hovel and Henry’s dream. As a family narrative, the aura of adventure and perseverance and capability has powerful resonance.

Once every year, my mother trundled my sister and me on the train across the country to this place of my grandfather’s dream in Oregon. Black and white photos document the years spent on the peach orchard. Here is my grandfather, hammering nails into the bare

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framework of their house. And here my grandmother, harvesting baskets of sweet peaches under the watchful eye of Becky, their good old English Spaniel. And now my sister and me, wearing our babushkas over our heads, picking blackberries in the bramble bushes. It is not these moments recorded on film that I carry with me. I treasure the photos, but the abiding memory of the orchard is a moment, or many moments amalgamated in memory to one, in my grandmother’s kitchen, the light low and diffuse, with dust motes slipping along the streams of sunlight coming through the windows. My grandmother wears a floral dress, a white apron with a ruffle, and sensible shoes. She stands at the counter with a fresh peach in her hand, and she peels the skin free and gives me a sweet and juicy slice of the fruit.

The dream that was the orchard came crashing down when, as the received story goes, a neighbor left the irrigation water on all night, killing off Henry and Phoebe’s trees. Devastated by the loss, Henry suffered a stroke and died soon after. He is buried in the nearby cemetery. Though I believe my grandmother had come to love her life there, it was too much for her to manage on her own, so she returned to what must have been a somewhat staid city life. It was a sad end to all their hopes, to be sure. Yet the very sadness of their loss became an integral fragment of the story. They had succeeded for many years against the odds. They had made a life for themselves from nothing.

It was with this whole story freshly conjured in our minds that we turned onto Vawter Road and found number 1248. None of the surroundings were familiar to me; I had been so young the last time I was there.

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For my mother though, there was clearly an evocation of all the times she had been there before; her own life no doubt sped in fast forward before her eyes. She looked around and recalled this neighbor and that, and we imagined the peach trees standing healthy and strong, though they were, of course, no longer there. We could have gotten back in the car just then; our modest mission to see the old place had been accomplished. Instead, we knocked on the door of Henry and Phoebe’s house. The owner answered. His manner hovered between indifference and hostility. He remembered my grandfather. He had only one terse comment. “Yeah, he was the guy who left his own water on all night and destroyed his orchard.”

The stranger standing on the threshold of my grandfather’s house, the one built by his own hands, had just colonized our cherished family story with a new and unsettling truth (was it the truth?). I suppose he could not have known, and would not have had reason to think, that he was pulling on the thread that would unravel the rich tapestry of our history, so carefully woven and tended over these many years. I glanced over at my mother, vicariously sensing the devastating heartbreak his words might cause for her, one generation closer to the story than I was. She seemed abraded, wounded, diminished, part of her buttressing loosed by a sudden wind. The day, benign and pleasant only moments ago, now seemed inhospitable, even ominous. We made our way back to the main road. We never spoke of this moment again, as if our silence might somehow allow us to knit the story back into its original shape.

I saved the scrap of paper. I would say I don’t know

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why, but in a way, I think I do. It reminds me that the detour we took those years ago does not negate or detract from our story. It is still the story of vigorous people working the land, of people ready to take on the next challenge offered by life, and it is still the story that whispers “this is who we are.” There is a Spanish word that has no exact translation in English. Querencia describes a place where one feels safe, a place from which one’s strength of character is drawn, a place where one feels at home. It is the place where you are your most authentic self. It comes from the verb “quere,” which means to desire, to want. Barry Lopez defined it as “a place in which we know exactly who we are; the place from which we speak our deepest beliefs.” The memories of those warm moments in that kitchen have such transcendence for me, and I believe it is because the peach orchard became our querencia.

And so, on September mornings when I rise early, and the house is still wrapped in the quiet of the night, I walk into my kitchen that is redolent with the aroma of ripening peaches. I close my eyes. I am back in my grandmother’s kitchen. In a moment of timeless ritual, and surrounded by what I now recognize as a most abiding love, I take a peach slice from her hand. It is a moment of shared intimacy and extraordinary abundance which no words have the power either to amplify or to diminish.

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