Last spring I decided to dig out the lawn in front of the house and start a garden for the very first time. The stay-at-home order was in effect, and no one knew how long it would last. Doing something—anything—that wasn’t confined by four white walls helped to cope with the isolation of quarantine life.  

It wasn’t long before I realized that digging up the lawn to prepare the garden bed was not an easy task. Every day I would pull out the shovel and pound a tiny area to uproot the grass. Sometimes I’d get splinters on my hands from the shovel’s wooden handle, even while wearing gardening gloves. (Gardening tip: get puncture-resistant gloves.) It took weeks to dig a small plot of land that was large enough for one row of flowers situated in front of weeds that were impossible to get rid of.