He knew forty-one years of who had married and buried and moved away, the whole human weather of a neighborhood, and he held it all lightly, without gossip, the way you’d hold a bird.

What Sal understood, that it took me a whole season to learn, was that the garden was never really about vegetables.

The vegetables were the excuse.

What the garden actually grew, in its slow and dirt-handed way, was people — pulled out of their apartments and their grief and their loneliness and their phones, put next to each other in the open air with a shared task and a low fence, and left to root.

Sal had been growing people in that lot for forty-one years.