I overwatered the beans until they rotted and underwatered the lettuce until it bolted bitter.

I mistook the seedlings of things I’d planted for weeds and pulled them, and left actual weeds standing because they were, to my untrained eye, greener and more confident.

For a woman who had spent thirty years being the person in the room who knew the answer, who signed off on the doses that other people’s lives depended on, there was something close to unbearable in being so completely, dirt-under-the-nails incompetent at something a child could do.

And yet it was, I see now, the exact medicine I needed and would never have chosen.