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The Garden That Grew Me
Lessons of life, loss, and growth rooted in one patch of earth
I never thought of myself as someone who could grow things. Plants seemed like delicate mysteries — too easy to break, too complicated to understand. I’d see a friend’s lush basil spilling over a windowsill or a neighbor’s riot of petunias and feel a pang of both admiration and defeat. Better, I thought, not to try at all than to watch something die in my hands.
But life, with its quiet persistence, had other plans.
It began in the stillness after a storm of a year. My marriage ended. My job dulled to something I barely recognized. Even my beloved apartment, once a sanctuary, turned into a too-small box of memories I could no longer bear to carry. One gray Sunday, restless to the bone, I drove aimlessly through the rain, willing the road to take me somewhere else — anywhere else.
That’s how I found the nursery.
I pulled into the muddy lot as if guided by instinct. Bright flags whipped in the wind, and rows of green life stretched out under the dripping sky. Something in the air — the dampness, the scent of earth and wet leaves — pried open a space inside me I had forgotten was there.
I wandered among the seedlings, inhaling the musky, hopeful smell of growing things. I…
