I was not sad in a way I could explain to anyone.

I was something worse and quieter than sad.

I was unmoored — a competent, accomplished, respected woman of sixty, sitting alone at a kitchen table at dawn in a strange city, holding a pen over an empty week, with absolutely no idea who she was supposed to be now that she was no longer allowed to be who she had been.

Chapter 2 — The Fence

I found the garden because I had started taking walks, not for my health but to use up the hours, and there is only so long a person can walk before the walking itself begins to feel like a symptom.

It was a full city block, fenced in chain-link gone soft with morning glory, and inside it was a patchwork of small plots, some tidy and some wild, with a leaning shed in one corner and a hand-painted sign on the gate that read RIVERSIDE COMMUNITY GARDEN — PLOTS AVAILABLE — INQUIRE WITHIN.

I stood at the fence a long time, the way I’d stood at my empty planner, looking at something I did not know how to enter.

There were people in there, bent over the beds in the early light, and their unhurried belonging to the place was almost painful to watch.

I was about to move on when a voice said, “You gonna stand there judging my tomatoes, or you gonna come tell me what’s wrong with ’em?” An old man was leaning on a hoe two plots in, squinting at me with an expression that was equal parts challenge and invitation.

I did not know it yet, but that was the whole of my life turning on its hinge — a stranger at a fence, refusing to let me keep standing outside.

I have thought a great deal about thresholds since that morning, about how many of them we fail to cross and never know what we missed on the other side.

I had walked past that garden a dozen times.

I would have walked past it a dozen more.

Everything in me that was low and proud and afraid was built to keep me on my own side of that fence — to keep me a spectator of other people’s belonging, aching for it and certain I had aged out of it, telling myself a story in which the warmth inside was for other, luckier people and my part was only to observe it on my way to nowhere.