I pulled off Highway 101 into the parking lot for Oswald West State Park and nosed the car into a spot pressed against thick ferns and old-growth Sitka spruce. The driver seat headrest gave an impromptu neck massage as I turned my head from one side to the other. The plop-plop-plop of water smacked against the windshield, a metronome I hadn’t realized I’d missed.

I became a gardener in Colorado because, like my mother, I like being reminded I’m stubborn. The extreme weather and temperature fluctuations and the lack of water make gardening in the Denver metro area a lesson in persistence. Several years ago, I turned my attention from food gardening to flowers. You don't eat most flowers, but they feed a different part of us; for me, it’s the part that seeks beauty in a world that can be painfully rough around the edges.

South China Sea brushes against the shore of an island in Thailand, 2003. Image by author. Last year, I joined a professional writing certificate program at the University of Denver. I have trained in fiction writing; blogged for years now; and even taught rhetoric, composition, and research methods courses to undergrads. But I never studied the craft of creative nonfiction despite my longtime love of personal essays and memoir. When I received a tuition waiver benefit remind