Our family first joined a community garden when our kids were in elementary school. At the time, we didn’t know much about growing food, and we lived in a townhome with a small shady yard that had yielded two seasons of disappointment. We quickly discovered that gardening in the company of others gave us access to a wealth of knowledge and opportunity. Alongside neighbors—many of whom we might not have met otherwise—we dug, planted, watered, and weeded, and slowly learned the rhythm of life in the garden.

My mother, Marilyn Mackey, called her mother every Saturday morning for 30 years. “We would call to stay connected and know what was going on in each other's lives.” My mother reminds me, “That was when we paid for long-distance calls too.” But the practice of staying connected begins a generation before her. “My mother’s relationship with her mother, Grandma Miller, was that we saw them every weekend. We would go to their house on the farm and have a meal and play games.”