We always had a backyard summer garden — Daddy’s garden. My mom tended to her roses and other pretty things while my father fired up the tiller every spring and prepped the area of our yard known as the “very back” (because it was its own fenced area beyond the backyard). I didn’t have much interest in any of it — dirt, seeds, water, and the waiting, especially — but when we’d eat the sweet cherry tomatoes like candy right off the vines, with juicy, hot insides from the Texas sun, suddenly the whole gardening idea wasn’t so dull. Soon we’d be eating thick slices of tomatoes for dinner, sprinkled with salt. Cucumbers quickly became pickles (one of my father’s obsessions, along with making his...
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