Every summer, for years and years, I scratched out a tiny backyard vegetable garden in the high desert Colorado hardscrabble. Through droughts and wildfires and late freezes and early frosts, every year we managed to get a few tomatoes, some zucchini, cucumbers once, strange spindly kale.

But I loved my little patch of garden and was forever digging compost into it and laying out drip hoses and putting down mulch. There were lots of summers when my boys were with their father in North Carolina and Jonathan was with his boys in Massachusetts when it was just Spotty and I alone for weeks on end and I would dig away in the garden and she would sit in the sun next to me, panting and keeping me company. When she passed away, 10 years ago now, we buried her ashes under the old apple tree at the edge of the garden because she had been so happy there.

It's kind of crazy to garden in Italy because the local produce available in the markets is so abundant and tasty and inexpensive and always fresh-picked that morning. There is really no rational reason to go to the expense and bother of having a garden. And yet.

This morning, I discovered the first almost ripe tomato.