I met Esther and Arnold in 1964 or 1965 when they became Aunt Esther and Uncle Arnold. That winter Esther gave me green branches in a small pottery bowl – the most artsy and cherished gift I’d ever received. I kept the branches alive for more than a year in the same bowl. Looking back, I think it was salal or laurustinus, still favorites.

I was so young and in awe in Esther and Arnold’s home. It was mysterious, foreign, filled with everything exotic – Scandinavian furniture, brown seagrass (rice paper?) walls, Arnold’s black and white photos, a darkroom even, lots of wood, a sort of red color in the kitchen along with a kind of greenish blue, every size orange Le Creuset cookware, even skillets. There was Sina in the kitchen tie dying something or Esther and Arnold painting balsa wood Christmas tree ornaments.

Esther’s greatest gift to me was her garden. I pestered her to know the names of everything planted there. She had a beautiful Whitcombi cherry tree in front of the house for years, and brought me branches in bloom on a January birth day. She had a giant bed of strawberries! I wanted to know every plant, and she taught me. I learned names like cotoneaster and viburnum and staghorn sumac, Oregon grape, camellia, and forsythia.

Esther’s world was wondrous to me. One time she called and said she had a birch tree that had volunteered in the wrong place and did I want it. It was big, but I brought it home and planted it like a novice, fearfully. Somehow, thanks probably to Seattle’s rain, it lived to be a full grown tree by our driveway, and even after I moved I thought of Esther whenever I saw it.

Esther to me was always an ageless and beautiful Ingrid Bergman. The last time I saw her, I took her pictures of my current garden, including one of the patio covered with tawny brown dawn redwood needles, and I took her huge rosy blooming branches from my own Whitcombi cherry. I told her how much I had learned to love from her. g