Chapter 14 — Volunteers

In gardening there’s a word for the plants that come up on their own — the tomato that seeds itself from last year’s dropped fruit, the sunflower the birds plant, the squash that erupts from the compost where you never sowed a thing.

You call them volunteers.

They arrive unbidden, in ground you’d given up on, and they are often the hardiest things you grow, because nobody coddled them; they simply decided, against the odds and without permission, to live.

I have thought a great deal, this first autumn of the rest of my life, about volunteers.