The lady two gravel roads over went into a care home in May. Her garden plot had been sitting, going to weeds ever since.
I decided to clear it. Not for myself—I don't need more tomatoes—but because I couldn't stand the sight of it all gone wild.
In the shed she left, there was a tattered seed catalog. A grocery-store receipt from 2007 marked her page. Ten dollars and thirty-two cents for onion sets and marigold seeds.
That receipt looked just like the ones my best friend's mother used to tuck into her gardening books. She taught me how to pinch off basil tips and never plant cucumbers too close to melons.
I knelt in the dirt and started pulling. Crabgrass, bindweed, a volunteer squash that had no business there.
By the time I finished the first row, my knees ached and my hands were black with soil. But the plot looked like a promise again.
I planted a single row of zinnias, the kind Mrs. Gentry always grew. That was my small joy—the ordinary act of keeping something alive that someone else started.