Ruth raised a family over a laundry in Macon, Georgia, with nothing but a concrete back porch you could cross in four steps and a set of stairs that baked in the afternoon like a skillet.
Off that little porch — in buckets, dishpans, and paint cans set out for the trash — she fed a husband, three children, and more grandbabies than she can count on both hands, most of the time on money they plain did not have.
“You do not need land. You never did. You need sun, a few containers, some dirt you mixed right, and somebody to show you the little things nobody writes down.”
After fifty years, she finally wrote it all down — the way she'd tell her own granddaughter if she moved into an apartment tomorrow and called, scared she couldn't do it.
— Ruth