Still, I’d always been a willing student. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness it teaches industry and thrift above all it teaches entire trust.” I needed just such things, myself, for I couldn’t trust my own body and hadn’t learned to accept new realities. Gertrude Jekyll, a 19th-century woman who designed more than 400 gardens, once said, “A garden is a grand teacher. I am disabled I am autistic and have a connective tissue disorder that causes problems for my mobility. When I next approached the garden plot, it wasn’t for food security but succor of a different kind. It would be years later, in adulthood, that I would also discover the joy. My first experience of gardening was a lesson in scarcity and sustenance. No income, no insurance, eking out a living on dwindling unemployment: We plowed up the extensive lawn and planted rows and rows of vegetables we could can and preserve. My mother had just survived the first of many bouts with cancer - and had been laid off. My father had suffered a massive heart attack earlier that year his job wasn’t waiting for him when he recovered. Otherwise, our crops would die, and that garden was the only way we were getting through winter well-fed. We did it twice a week, bouncing in the back on our way to the pond at the edge of our property for water. I was 12, my brother 8 we’d climbed into the bed of my father’s pickup truck - along with a dozen empty plastic containers. The dirt road painted everything white with dust a drought had hit us early and promised to cling late. The summer stretched long and hot in southeastern Ohio, where the Appalachian hills begin their climb.
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