The Seed Remembers

Post-Affair Lessons from the Ether

After I sold my longtime cottage in a beach town in Orange County, CA, I had a recurring dream. I was walking down my street and before I got to my house, the street disappeared. In its place was a wide swath of meadow grass that reached past my shoulders. I stopped and observed the green expanse for some time, not feeling disappointed so much as exhilarated that the choice to return was no longer in my hands.

In earth life, the Cape Cod style 1940s house, part of an original tract once designed for blue collar workers and schoolteachers and now boasting houses that reached into the multimillions, was being torn down to make way for a two story modern structure that the new owner, an architect, had designed specifically for the property. My house was one of the last originals on the street. He had at least pledged to preserve the 60 year old jacaranda tree in the back yard.

My former next door neighbor texted me that the house was being razed. Did I want pictures? I wouldn’t, he added.

No thank you, I said.

Decades of memories — new babies coming home from the hospital in their flannel swaddles, toddler boys scaling the apricot tree in the back yard with juice dribbling down their chins, all the way back to our Martha Stewart- worthy wedding reception planned by my mother-in-law— bled into the ether. I saw myself visiting S at the house for the first time in 1997, in a short tight sundress and white Converse tennis shoes, 27 and tanned and jubilant and blindly optimistic. The back yard was nothing but dirt and S, my not-yet husband, was still in full bachelor mode. He had only a box with a TV on it and one set of silverware, his mom’s farmhouse table and eight matching chairs, a king sized cherry wood sleigh bed that I later discovered with an unknown woman’s bathing suit underneath.

I loved the house immediately. The sun spilled in from all sides, a mature jacaranda dominated the backyard, the wood floors were worn yellow and red oak. The closets were tiny, a holdover from an era where people had a few sets of work clothes and their Sunday best. It was already home.

Over the following year I moved in, and S pledged his love to me in the bathtub, while candles glimmered and the TV show Friends played in the background. We were inseparable, enjoying wine on the patio while a family of skunks trooped past, walking hand in hand to nearby restaurants, planning our future. “I’ve never been this happy,” he told me, his handsome face warm and open, green eyes holding mine. I had never imagined wanting children, but suddenly it was all I could think about. He made me feel safe, adored, he seemed charmed by my esoteric interests, allowing me to put crystals all over his body for a healing session; burning sage over us both in the evenings. I knew we were meant to be. Cancer and Taurus, together forever. I wrote him love poems and cards, giddy that I got to have this incredible life with him.

I immediately enlisted him to help me plant a haphazard assortment of tea tree plants whose pink blooms reminded me of my treks through New Zealand. I’d fall asleep with the imprint of the plants on my eyelids, blissfully happy. I’d lived on both islands for a time after college, where I’d worked on biodynamic farms, usually barefoot, often sleeping under the stars in a tent I shared with my close friend and travel partner Karin. I was so grateful that I could keep that part of me thrummingly alive.

I planted crooked rows of vegetables and herbs behind the detached garage and added to a giant compost pile created by Pompeo, a gardener from Mexico and our local sage. He understood good soil. Everything I planted in that fertile ground grew vigorously and tasted better than any market produce. Basil and three kinds of tomatoes, peppers, strawberries, chamomile for tea. Edible flowers and potatoes and carrots. Pompeo grew tall stalks of corn and cactus alongside my rows and eventually an illegal robust marijuana plant, which he harvested before we had a chance to help ourselves to it.

When we got married, S’s mother’s generous gift to us was landscaping the back yard so we could host our wedding reception there. The first things to go were the crooked vegetable rows and the compost pile. In their place were three neat squares with peat gravel and tidy hedges of rosemary and lavender and roses. Next came geometric shrubs to replace the wild pink blossomed tea tree plants. It was magazine-beautiful now, a grown up space. It no longer looked like a commune. We were so lucky. I’d hid in the bathroom and cried, embarrassed, mourning the loss of something I couldn’t yet name.

Over the next several years the expansive back yard had housed rabbits, a giant tortoise, a black Lab named Bear, a play house castle, a trampoline. Countless birthday parties and wedding showers were hosted. The space was joyful, but there was an undertone of something that felt like a warning. S was working late more and more. He expressed unhappiness with my inattention, the state of the house with two small children. I was no longer toned and tanned. The cozy child fingerprint-streaked den where we had once snuggled to watch movies and share stories about the day ultimately bore witness to the violent rending of our marriage and our family. It was there, facing each other, feet touching on the hand-me-down brown corduroy couch, that my husband tearfully revealed an affair with a work associate.

“It was brief, it’s over now.”

I bolted upright, swinging my feet away from his. I was reminded of a video I saw of a person pulled from a fire, inert, and placed on a stretcher. Out of nowhere, the person lurched up and had to be wrestled back down. Apparently it was just muscle constrictions and they were actually dead or dying, not fighting the paramedics. I felt like my actions were animated by some other force; the me I’d known moments before was surely dead. I could feel words boiling up like vomit. Before I could interrupt him and say that I’d already suspected, and that we would work together to do whatever it took to rebuild our relationship, before I could squirt out a plume of desperate octopus ink to cloud the black hole that had just opened up, he surprised me by soldiering on.

“She’s pregnant, though,” he added.

The following year was a blur of bargaining, threatening, ultimatums not followed through, tears, fleeing and freezing. We tried renting out our cottage and moving down the street, a chance to live in a home that had not carried our particular brand of trauma. It was a grand two story with a pool, with many spaces to furnish. It could have been a fresh start, but it felt impossible. No amount of rooms allowed me any relief. Our children, 6 and 8 then, were confused over how they could have a brother that didn’t come from me. My fantasies that the other woman would vanish and take her baby with her died many deaths. I wanted a stable home life and a nuclear family, and so did she. My husband seemed paralyzed, alternating with despair and anger, alternating between two of everything.

“I can’t make anyone happy,” he lamented.

Ultimately, I broke the stalemate and moved back to our cottage up the street. We filed for divorce. A year later, his affair partner was pregnant again and moved into the grand house down the street. Her clothes filled my old closet. In a fit of defiance, I’d left my wedding dress behind on one of its shelves, but my ex spied the box and dropped it off on my porch. Her body filled half of my old bed. There were two new children in the bedrooms vacated by our children, who themselves then moved down the hall to the last bedroom and the upstairs playroom. Our timelines had irrevocably tangled and blurred. Even her birthday, name and general blonde, blue eyed look were not far from my own.

I found myself obsessed with the idea of Dopplegangers. I was both fascinated and repelled by the idea of a ghost version of myself occupying that house. Or was I the ghost? Double spirits are well known in the realms of folklore, myths, and religious traditions across the globe. In Norse mythology, a vardøger is a ghostly double who is seen performing the person's actions in advance. In Finnish mythology, this pattern is described as having an etiäinen, or a “firstcomer." In Ancient Egyptian mythology, a ka was a tangible "spirit double" having the same memories and feelings as its human counterpart. A karin or quarin, common in many Muslim countries, is a potentially benevolent or harmful spirit double of the same sex, race and parallel temperament as the person it is connected to. It bears children which are the spirit doubles of the person's children.

Benevolent or evil, I was living my very own twisted folk tale. An unwelcome real-time reflection, where to deny what my shadow wanted was to deny my own desires: to be loved, to be safe, to be a family. Bitterness twinned with compassion drifted across our shared universe.

The boys and I settled back into the cottage, and I ripped out the front lawn S had put in and planted a native garden. Hummingbird and white sage, narrow leaf milkweed, and yarrow blended with poppies and herbs. The air was filled with birds and insects, much-welcomed new life. The house itself was more worn now, with plentiful deferred maintenance and a termite problem. It was porous in ways I hadn’t prepared for. We had rats and mice running rampant once the lights were off. Eventually, they didn’t even wait for the lights to go off. One night the boys and I were watching a movie and wordlessly watched a rat saunter across the kitchen and disappear inside the piano.

Rodent remediation kicked off a host of other expensive attempts to keep the old house standing upright. Toilets stopped working and showers slowed to dribbles. One outside beam was collapsing with rot because the sprinklers had been trained to hit the side of the house over the last 15 years. Large winged cockroaches began appearing mysteriously in my younger son’s bedroom. The boys divided time between the two homes, likely secretly preferring the grand two story, but sparing my feelings.

I continued to behave as if this were only a hiatus, cooking at the old stove, trying to keep the poorly sealed refrigerator from defrosting. I had once read the boys an old Irish tale about a woman who waits every day for her fisherman husband to return from sea after a violent storm. She carefully maintains the exact routine each day, hanging the washing and warming the soup in a heavy cast iron pot. She stands on the porch and watches the horizon. The wooden cradle in the bedroom is empty, her children long grown and gone. Eventually, she knows, he will come home to her. She is patient, and she has faith. I don’t remember how it ended, except that the sea never brought him back.

As the boys’ grade school years eventually morphed to the end of high school, I’d begun to wake up in the morning with the distinct sensation of being pushed. I tried moving my bed around the room, removing a desk, adding a rug. I still felt unsettled. I called a close friend and told her it felt like the house was rejecting me. Or maybe I was now rejecting this version of me. We often spoke to each other this way, the world full of signs and spirits animating the everyday, so she was not surprised. I also had to acknowledge that living down the street from another version of my life was a constant ripping open of a wound. No amount of pretending would staunch the lifeblood.

She agreed. “It sounds like it’s time to let go.”

On a whim, I called my father and his real estate agent. I needed help to actually put this insane idea into motion. They came up with a high price point and we put the house on the market “as is.” The land was valuable; the house was a teardown to anyone but me. I reasoned that it would not likely sell and I could safely say I tried, and just rot right there along with the house for the rest of my days. It was like selling my own skin, as decrepit as it might have become.

Four days later, we had two strong offers with a 30 day escrow. I was floored. What had I done? Either I had committed a colossal error, or the parts of me that I’d systematically erased or buried over the years had finally emerged and spoken. Regardless, it was done. It was time to be new.

Several months prior, a college friend and I had gone on a native desert plant tour in Joshua Tree. The tour guide talked about how certain seeds stayed underground for years or even decades, inert, waiting for the right conditions to emerge from the underworld of sand and soil and into the sunlight. How nature has shown us throughout history that conditions appearing cataclysmic — fire, floods — are essential to spark life.

“The seed always remembers,” she said. It seemed poetic and I’d written it in my journal with no further reflection. Now, I think about the idea of the seed as a living fractal, the blueprint contained in perfect miniature. That we have everything we need to thrive coded into our very DNA, the universe not judging or punishing but rather endlessly mirroring us back to ourselves. I like to believe that the chaos we perceive might be divinely ordered, an invitation to step through the pain and be exploded open to create anew, over and over again.