Hope is the courage to begin again.

The spring after her husband died, my neighbor Ruth turned the small patch of dirt behind her house into a vegetable garden. She was seventy-one. She had never grown anything. The first season, the tomatoes came up leggy and pale, then collapsed under their own weight. The zucchini rotted. A rabbit ate the lettuce down to the roots in a single night.

The second season she added a low fence, better soil, a book from the library. The tomatoes did slightly better but a late frost killed most of them in a single April night. I remember watching her from my kitchen window that morning, standing in the wet garden in her housecoat, looking at the blackened leaves with her arms crossed. I thought she'd give up.

Instead, that afternoon, I heard her out there again, turning the dirt. By the third summer the tomato plants were taller than her fence, dripping with fruit, and she was leaving grocery bags of them on her neighbors' porches with little notes. Sitting on her back step one August evening she told me, quietly: 'I wasn't really growing vegetables the first two years, you know. I was growing the habit of beginning again. The vegetables were just the proof that it worked.