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I come from serious gardeners on both sides, believe it or not. Both of my grandfathers had garden land that was probably bigger than my current lot size, house and all. My mother LOVES to garden, and both of my siblings are into it as well.
And then there’s me.
Gardening isn’t the only gene that got used up before I came along, but it may be the most practical one. I’m a fan of eating from the garden, of course, but I stink at proactively planning it, planting it, and sustaining it. I want to be good at it, yes, but I don’t want to actually put in the work. I’m not proud of this, you understand, but I’ve accepted it about myself. (I still try, of course, because GARDEN TOMATOES, but my efforts fall far short of what they could be.)
What does this have to do with baseball, you ask? Simple. While I find watching a baseball game to be a dull prospect in the extreme–sorry, Zach!–I’m perfectly happy reading fiction about it, and it’s the same with gardening. Abbi Waxman’s The Garden of Small Beginnings had me hooked from the beginning, and the gardening tips were every bit as engaging as the rest of it. Lili’s grief was compelling and real, and yet the book had me laughing more than anything else; Waxman’s snarky, spot-on comments about life and parenthood were priceless. I cared about the cast of characters, too, although there were perhaps more similarities among them than there was meant to be. I’ve always loved stories about pulling through the hard patches of life, and this book had that in spades. If it weren’t for the language I’d be shoving it into the hands of every parent I met, because it really was that funny-yet-thoughtful, but the number of F-words and the several instances of higher-level religious profanity made me wince. This was likely worse because it was an audiobook, but still. I know that a disturbing number of people in this word do drop the F-word with a frightening casualness, but I don’t like hearing it. Couldn’t we all be a little more creative in our vocabulary choices?
Anyway. If you can deal with the language, this is a take on parenting, grief, and growth (all kinds, including vegetable!) that got me from the beginning. I just wish I’d stuck with the advanced print copy I won, instead of grabbing the audio so that I could listen while I exercised and did housework.