I had simply never been told that you can start another one at sixty, from scratch, in the ground, and that it will grow.

Chapter 12 — Sal

In September, Sal fell.

It was nothing dramatic — he got dizzy watering his tomatoes and went down in the path and couldn’t get up, and Darnell found him and called for help, and it turned out to be his blood pressure and a medication that needed adjusting, and he was fine, or would be.

But for a few days, while he was in the hospital being monitored, the garden held its breath, because none of us had ever known the place without him, and we were suddenly, frighteningly aware that the man who had grown all of us was seventy-six.

And here is the thing that finished my whole year.