My mother grew Burpee cucumbers for eating and pickling, ruby red Mister Lincoln roses to pretty the table, and oblong Roma tomatoes for salads and canning. Her flowers lined the borders of our brick house—red and orange bobble-headed marigolds on one side and velvety trumpets of purple and pink petunias on the other. When she wasn’t looking, I plunged my hands into her gardening beds, chasing fat earthworms through the loam. I liked the squidgy feeling of them inching across my skin, their pointy heads yearning for the dark safety of dirt. This was suburban Detroit in the 1970s, humid and green in summer. My Uncle Buddy took me fishing for smallmouth bass off the ends of docks using my earthworm reserve held captive in one of Mom’s Ball canning jars.

Some years, she planted squash and zucchini, too. The one thing my mother never attempted to grow was lettuce. Inert, crispy heads of iceberg formed the basis of our salads, topped with oily Wishbone Italian Dressing. Lettuce came solely from the store.

At age twelve, I traveled by myself for the first time to visit Aunt Ellen, my father’s sister, in Southern California. I was enthralled by beach culture—the lithe, bronzed bodies of surfers and curvy, powerful silhouettes of Bettys. It was the 1980s, the first of many summers that I flew out to visit Aunt Ellen and Uncle Darrell in sunny Redondo Beach. One afternoon, I stood agape, watching my aunt tear small green leaves into a white ceramic bowl. On top, she sliced tomatoes, broccoli florets, a hard-boiled egg, and sharp white cheese. She tossed the salad with olive oil and brown vinegar.

“What’s that?” I said, wrinkling my nose.

“What?” She blinked from beneath a mop of bleached blonde hair.

“That.” I pointed. “That green stuff. The leaves.”

“My dear, have you never seen spinach?”

I had. The petite leaves in my aunt’s bowl in no way resembled Del Monte’s, or my mother’s—or my—idea of spinach. Mom’s spinach came from a can. She heated the gloppy goulash on the stove, and we ate it warm with apple cider vinegar.

“Try some,” my aunt said, pushing the dish to me.

I pierced the leaves with her fork then popped them in my mouth, expecting bitterness. The world opened up for me in that moment. Green goodness folded over my tongue. The grassy tang of spinach tasted . . . healthy. I wondered: when fresh spinach existed, why did we eat iceberg lettuce at home?

That summer in California, my aunt and I experimented with salads, mixing romaine, frisée and spinach, white radishes and tawny Cremini mushrooms, tossing the concoction with olive oil and vinegars I never knew existed—white wine, red wine, tarragon, balsamic—rather than store-bought dressing.

My aunt’s adventurous salads made me see that my mother’s vegetables were tasteless, overcooked and limp. At home, what we ate came from the grocery store, mainly from cans, rather than the fresh whole foods Aunt Ellen bought from Bristol Farms, a fancy market.

In my parents’ defense, we had moved from Detroit to Phoenix in 1980 where it was impossible to replicate the garden we grew in Michigan. My mother’s tomato crop suffered plagues of fat, green worms that gnawed through the leaves before the vines turned brown and died from the 115-degree heat. Out front, in the gravel yard, her marigolds and petunias were scorched within days, like paper in fire. After suffering wholesale defeat our first summer, Mom gave up trying to grow anything in Arizona. We switched from homegrown Romas to tasteless beefsteaks from the produce pyramids in Fry’s. In Phoenix, the iceberg lettuce persisted, along with canned corn, canned peas and—of course—canned spinach.

It wasn’t until after college that I kept my own shopping list. I was finally free to indulge in vegetables my parents never served: Brussels sprouts, artichokes, radicchio, chard, kale, eggplant. I subscribed to Bon Appetit, which introduced me to vegetable dishes that were menageries of colors and textures—miniature artworks in bowls. The more I cooked, the more I looked down my nose at my Midwestern roots, fancying myself far more worldly than my parents.

By thirty-four, I thought I knew how to cook. That is, until I traveled to Italy. My boyfriend at the time brought me along on a business trip in 2008. Our first night, we dined in the home of his colleague, a Veronese man whose daughter, Claelia, age twelve, joined us at the table. I crowed with delight at the salads: fresh red oak leaves from their garden, thin slices of cucumber and virgin radish, curls of orange carrot. I poured olive oil on top and began shaking the vinegar over my salad. Claelia, her face a mask of horror, shouted, “Basta!” She pointed at my salad. “Too much!”

The conversation quieted. The “real” adults around the table—my boyfriend and our hosts, all in their early fifties—chuckled at me. I shrank into my skin. Claelia gently removed the glass vinegar bottle from my hand. “Watch,” she said, pulling her own salad dish close.

She ground pink rock salt into her palm. “First, you add the sale,” she said, sprinkling a thin layer of salt crystals evenly over the greens. “Then you add aceto.” She showered a hint of balsamic vinegar over the salad. “The vinegar breaks down the salt. Then you mix,” she said, turning the greens over a few times. “Last, you add oil—just a touch. If you add the oil, then the vinegar, the acid cannot penetrate the leaf. That’s why you use so much.”

She drizzled oil over her salad in a Z shape and gave the greens another turn before spearing a forkful and placing it lightly in her mouth.

“Mmmm,” she crooned. “Ai capito?” Do you understand?

“Ho capito.” I nodded dutifully, as if I was the child.

This twelve-year-old girl knew more about gastronomy than I did at thirty-four. Admittedly, I did not have the benefit of an epicurean Italian household growing up. For my parents, eating was a utilitarian act, best accomplished quickly. Despite my own experiments, I inherited their provincial world view, curbed by geography and limited finances. Though we weren’t poor, my working-class family was conservative and cost-conscious. From them, I learned to shop with coupons from the newspaper. If canned green beans were on sale, that’s what we ate because that’s what we could afford. Consumer pricing, rather than health, flavor, or enjoyment, drove our meals.

I took Claelia’s salad-dressing lesson home from Italy. My life became about learning everything Italian, thanks to her—language, culture, and food. I discovered aspects of my mother’s heritage that she, herself, had missed from her own mother. Uncle Buddy reminded me that he and Mom were raised to assimilate—to be American—rather than Italian. My own mother had died when I was sixteen—too soon for me to formulate the questions I wanted to ask her until it was too late. Twenty years after her death, my one remaining path to her heritage and mine came through cooking Italian food and visiting Italy—where both of my grandparents’ families had come from.

In 2010, I was awarded a two-month fellowship to write a book in Civita di Bagnoregio, a hill town in central Italy. It was my first time traveling overseas alone. I went armed with rudimentary Italian language skills and Claelia’s salad advice. I arrived at my little stone house, after hoofing it up a steep, crumbling causeway, overjoyed to discover a vegetable garden on site. Tony Costa Heywood, an American architect and the surviving spouse of the organization’s founder, invited me to dinner at his home across the campo from mine that evening.

“Go cut us lettuce for salad,” he said, pointing to the garden, which hung at the cliff’s edge. He handed me scissors. I stood there, dumbly. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I don’t know how,” I admitted.

“Well, you just cut it,” he said, shooing me away like one of the fat, lazy flies that buzzed through his open kitchen. “Here, take a bowl with you.”

I was thirty-six and had never trimmed fresh lettuce. Would I kill his plants? I tiptoed through the neat rows of green and red lettuce heads, smelling the nearby tomatoes sizzling in the August sun. The aroma of ripening vines returned me to my mother’s postage stamp-sized garden in Detroit, to the crimson globes that would find their way into salads and glass Ball jars of stewed tomatoes—canned sunshine for us to eat during the bleak, snowy winters.

That summer and fall, while I wrote my book in Italy, Tony and I shared many dinners, which included salads from his garden. I learned to harvest lettuce and clip herbs, reserving the scraps for compost in the garden. Tony was impressed with my ability to dress a proper salad; the rest of my burgeoning sous chef skills developed over time.

Upon returning home to Seattle that October, I experienced a similar shock to the one I had from my first summer in California with Aunt Ellen: after eating homegrown Italian vegetables for two months, their American counterparts tasted like ash in my mouth. How did we consume such bland food without knowing it? With every bite of American salad, I lamented the loss of the culinary revelation I found in Italy. The memory of Tony’s tomatoes on my tongue degraded and dulled over time.

Today, eight years after my return from Civita, I make salad each night for my husband, Michael, and myself. “My salad never tastes as good as yours,” he insists.

Of course, the flavor he loves isn’t all mine. It’s Claelia’s protocol of proper seasoning. Each night, I stuff our bowls with spinach, arugula, leaf lettuces, and radicchio. Some nights, I feather in thin-sliced chard or dino kale. At the back of my mind lurk the manifold benefits of dark, green leafy vegetables. With each bite, I taste the calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, sodium, and zinc along with thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, folate and vitamins B6, C, A, E, and K. Iceberg lettuce contains essentially none of these. My parents’ Midwestern diet, which I was raised on, makes me shudder—canned fruits and vegetables, red meat, white bread, refined sugars—and wonder if it contributed to the cancer that killed my mother at age 45. The cancer I hope doesn’t find me now that I am turning 45. The cancer I imagine I’m shielded from, thanks to my salads and fresh vegetables.

Last year, Michael and I bought a quaint house with a large yard southwest of Seattle. Our friends noted that it was a sizable property for a middle-aged couple with no kids. “What are you going to do with all that space?” they kept asking.

I smiled. I had plans.

This spring, Michael taught me how to build raised beds from cedar planks. We sealed them with linseed oil to protect them from rot. The nutty smell of the boiled yellow oil in the Pacific Northwest sun reminded me of Tony’s garden in Italy.

First, we built two small beds—one for herbs, one for greens. Then we built a third bed, tall and deep enough for vines: tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, zucchini, and peas. In July, the tall bed is finding its early fruit: knobby, curved gherkins and green clusters of Roma, Sungold, and Early Girl tomatoes. The herbs, arugula, lettuces, and chard I planted back in April are going gangbusters out front.

“Will you make a salad from the garden?” Michael asked the other night.

I took my harvesting bowl and walked out to our raised beds, snipping tender fans of pink and yellow chard, sturdy feathered wings of arugula and stout, crisp leaves of red oak and green leaf lettuces. To them, I added clippings of dill, basil, chives, and parsley. While my salads have become more diverse in their herb mixtures, Claelia’s dressing protocol remains the same.

This garden is the first of my own that I’ve tended. Each night, I wash our homegrown greens, thinking of how far my relationship with vegetables has come, united on both ends by a garden. It has swung away at times, too, interrupted by city life where apartments don’t come with space for growing plants and cooperative garden patches in urban neighborhoods have years-long waiting lists. For most people living in cities, a salad starts and ends with a trip to the grocery store. Or, if we’re very lucky, a weekly farmer’s market.

American cultural disconnect with fresh food results from societal detachment: we do not see agriculture in our daily lives, thanks to our land use codes. We do not grow our own vegetables, livestock, or grain—nor do we know the people who do. We confuse shopping the organic aisle with health and wellness; we equate a CSA membership with an understanding of our food system. On top of this, fruits and vegetables, particularly organic ones that are healthier and less toxic to the earth, are expensive, and thus out of reach of families like the one I came from. In some cases, fresh food is not available, period. In urban food deserts, hamburgers, fries, and soda pop abound, but you can’t find a banana or an apple—not even a head of iceberg lettuce. In a country of $1 fast-food menus, simple, responsibly-grown vegetables and fruits are a luxury. We do not yet know the full and ultimate cost of cheap, fatty, high-calorie foods on our national health, our healthcare system, or our life expectancies but we’re feeling a nationwide crisis of obesity, diabetes, and cancer. I can’t help wondering how these same processed foods, which my family ate almost exclusively growing up, affected my mother’s health and, ultimately, my own.

I have little hope that this phenomenon will change until we integrate agriculture into our cities at multiple levels. Growing food, even in a small bed or window box, could change our cultural attitudes towards health and the environment. I believe that, the more food people can grow for themselves, the better stewards we are of the planet. I hesitate to spray chemicals in my yard. Our food systems, particularly the earth in which they grow and those who grow our food, are not obvious to us, and for that reason, we don’t protect them. It is difficult to understand or care about things and people we do not see. We expect food to appear magically in the misted supermarket shelves or under hot lamps, ready to eat. In our fast-paced lives, we trade quality for convenience. We blindly trust in the health and safety of what we buy without stopping to research the chemicals, processes, and people behind our food—nor do we consider the challenges that modern farmers face in order to feed our nation, the world, and their own families.

What I’ve realized: the Italian way of growing and cooking is best. I call it the Rule of Five. In Italy, the raw materials taste so good you don’t need many of them, and little is done to alter them from their original state. A pasta dish might only contain noodles, tomatoes, salt, mushrooms, and rosemary—and it’s delicious. I cook this way at home now, using a few fresh ingredients, as many as I can from my own garden, where I know what’s gone into them.

Growing food doesn’t make me a sage or a farmer, but it has opened my eyes to a view of the world that I had never paused to see. Each day I walk my garden, assessing the resources spent and benefits gained from safekeeping these organisms, upon which my body depends. I rejoice in the rain because my plants are watered for free. I consider the health of my soil, fertilized organically and tilled by tunneling earthworms, and how quickly the water drains away from it. I celebrate the appearance of life, verdant and green—the magic of seeds transmuted into curling pea vines and yellow zucchini flowers. I find sun-fried leaves or holes where an insect has gnawed through and feel protective. When plants die, as they sometimes do, without explanation (RIP yellow squash), I mourn. These plants are my babies. I am Khaleesi, Mother of Lettuces.

These simple joys—of planting, tending, harvesting, and eating from a homegrown garden have placed me in closer proximity with my roots. I remember waving to Roger Schembrei, my godfather who lived next door to us in Michigan, while I was out in the garden with my parents. Today, I wave at Darby across the street, and Brad and Julie next door, who stop by to chat when they see us working in the yard. This is the first time in seventeen years that I know my neighbors by name; I have my garden to thank for that. In the city, I was either inside my apartment or I was out.

Tending my garden conjures the sense memories of my childhood: the aroma of plants sautéing in the humid Michigan air, signaling a dark gray thunderstorm that would break the swelter. Or that summer with Tony in Italy when I nervously cut my first lettuces. I plunge my hands into the dirt, and I feel connected to the planet and the atmosphere. I think about time and seasons, past and present. I recall long-ago moments with my family, all of whom have passed away, including Uncle Buddy. Thanks to my garden, I have tapped into the Italian culture encoded in my DNA. It makes me look differently at the food on my fork. My garden steers my hunger towards the simplest dishes with the most vegetables. My garden, almost more than my house, is my home.

Each time I tend to it, I learn something—how to coax beets and carrots from seed, or thin them once they’re established—insights about the natural world which we humans have separated ourselves from. In those magic moments of communion, I wish I had someone to pass my knowledge onto. That is the ultimate goal of growing a family garden: traditions made and transmitted, learning lived and shared—an appreciation of resilience, dependence, and unity. Garden life is delicious and crunchy. It is green and red, purple and yellow. It is lush and lusty, brimming with bees. Growing my own food has taught me the value of life at its most delicate—and strong. It has delivered the tender legacy of a simple immigrant heirloom potato from South America, entrusted to me by a co-worker who hopes the line his grandmother grew will live on.

I sink my hands into the rich, black soil and think of my mother and the gardening traditions she passed down from her parents, and they from theirs. It ends here, in the Pacific Northwest, with me. As the fat, glistening earthworms inch across my palm, I become that child of six again. I am safe and surrounded by my mother’s love, still with me. The sun warms my face and I taste the memory of her in cool green cucumber slices on my tongue. In that synchronous moment, merging past and present, I imagine the sort of mother that I could have been to a girl like me—a child I might have grown and tended in my own sunny stretch of earth—if I had given myself the chance.

The meaning of a garden changes then.

There will be no one to carry on after I am gone. No one to learn from me how to cook a simple pasta or properly dress a salad. No one to gain my secret for growing Early Girl tomatoes or frying zucchini flowers stuffed with anchovy and cheese. My parents and grandparents nurtured my growth, focusing every resource on me the way a gardener cares for her crops. My family fed and clothed me, the way a gardener waters deeply after a sunny day. They encouraged me in school and life, the way a gardener erects trellises to support pea vines climbing upwards to the sun. They worked and weeded so that I could flower, and I have—I am one giant Dinnerplate dahlia blooming in the front yard—but the joke is on them. I was the treasured seed they engendered, the one meant to ensure our family’s legacy, and I have not brought a child into this world to carry forth their genes and traditions. The blossom my forebears pinned their lineage on has failed them. In me, the past lives and dies. When my leaves finally curl, and my body returns to dust, to nurture someone else’s crops, that will be that. Our line will not propagate.

I waver on this choice occasionally. Am I letting down generations of my family and missing out on the greatest of human experiences by not becoming a mother? At 44, time is ticking to make a last-minute decision otherwise. The truth is, I don’t want kids enough to have them. I relish the quiet of my child-free garden, surrounded by lush, living things that cannot speak or giggle or embrace me—green, burgeoning beasts whose full fruit I twist away from the vine and eat, alone, happily. The nagging question is: when Michael dies before me, as he likely will, given our age difference, and I have no children or grandchildren to comfort me, will I regret not making the sacrifice of motherhood in exchange for its benefits?

The sweet juice of an orange Sungold drips down my chin. The bees buzz on the yellow yarrow and the feathery green tops of carrots shiver in the salty breeze. I am in my garden. I am home. I am alone. Deep in my roots, the fear of dying, and dying alone, has always been there, too. It’s entwined in my genes, the most human of conditions that cannot be averted—children or no. We are born to flower and die. It’s a delicious, verdant tragedy, that we’re meant to last a short season.

Day by day, my garden teaches me this is normal, a fact of cycles and balance. Our lives are precious, but dying is not unfair. I am learning, slowly, to be okay with that.