She caught me one morning eating a store sandwich at my plot and looked at it the way you’d look at a child eating paste, and the next day there was warm food waiting, and after that she simply fed me, without ceremony, as though I had been added to some list she kept.

I learned, over the season, small pieces of her — that she had come to this country in her forties with almost nothing, that the greens she grew were the tastes of a home she would not see again, that the garden was, for her too, a way of staying rooted to a life that had been pulled up by the roots.

We were both, in our different ways, transplants.

She had crossed an ocean and I had only crossed a state, and hers was the harder journey by every measure, and still we met in the same dirt as equals, two women who had lost a world and were growing a new one in a vacant lot, feeding whoever showed up hungry.