I had spent my life mistaking the loud kind of importance for the real kind.

It took an old man with a hoe to show me the difference, and I got to watch it up close for exactly one season before his fall reminded us all how little of it we had left.

Chapter 5 — Everything I Killed

I was, at first, spectacularly bad at it, and it humbled me in a way I badly needed and did not enjoy.

I planted tomatoes too early and the cold took them.