Your story is worth telling. Let's get it written.

My mother kept a garden behind our apartment building in Cleveland. It wasn't really allowed — nobody had said yes to it — but nobody said no either, so every spring she went out there with a trowel and made it hers again. Tomatoes. Pole beans on strings she ran up the fence. And some kind of squash that took over everything, the way it does, vines crawling across the strip of dirt and into the parking spaces like they had somewhere to be. In August she'd hand me the colander before school. Go get what's ready. I'd go down the back stairs in my school clothes and stand in that little patch with the traffic going by on the other side of the building, and the tomatoes would still be warm from the night. That's the part I remember most — not the taste, the warmth. Holding one in my hand and it being warm before the day had even started. She never wrote any of this down. I don't have a single picture of that garden. But I know exactly how the colander felt with the tomatoes in it, and I know she was upstairs at the window, watching to make sure I got the right ones.