All of it came up as volunteers, in a fenced lot I almost walked past, in the worn handle of a hoe that had steadied a hundred uncertain hands before mine.

That is the part I most want to say to whoever is standing where I stood — at the empty planner, at the fence, at the end of the only life they knew how to have.

We are told that the good life is a planned crop: you decide what you want, and you sow it in rows, and you tend it, and it comes up more or less as designed.

And for a while, when we are young and the ground is generous, it seems to work that way.