He was prescribing, to a stiff and frightened woman, the one thing that could soften her back into a person who could grow: the daily, humbling, necessary experience of being a beginner, of failing at something small and surviving the failure, of learning that being wrong about the frost line is not a catastrophe but a tuition.

I killed a whole flat of tomatoes and did not die of it.

That sounds like nothing.

It was, for me, a kind of rebirth — the first time in decades I had been permitted to be new.

I nearly quit twice that first month, and both times it was Sal, appearing at the edge of my plot without seeming to have walked there — you didn’t kill it, you found the frost line, cheapest tuition you’ll ever pay — and both times I stayed.

One morning I found three bean seedlings up in a neat green row that I had planted and not killed, and I stood over them and felt a pride so absurd and so total that I had to laugh at myself, alone, in a fenced lot, at sixty years old, over three beans.