The Persistence of Pearl

I don’t typically shy away from garden work, but this year was different. Maybe the heat indexes were more oppressive—the stresses of the world certainly seemed so—or maybe I flat out did something terrible to make the soil more intent on feeding weeds than my tomatoes. When I’d look out over the raised beds from the window of my study in Columbia, South Carolina, I felt anything but the calm that scientific reports claim gardening brings. All I saw was a lengthening to-do list.

I needed