Here Is What I Grew For Us

Jessa has always fed us. Her friendship set the table, asked us in, kept the bowls full. For decades she has reminded us that nourishment is more than survival—it is comfort, it is delight.

This year, she arrived on our annual trip to Maine as she always does, the backseat of her car overflowing with crates of produce. This year, though, every leaf, every fruit, was rooted in her own soil. Not just ingredients for a meal, but offerings carried north in her hands. Sweet corn fragrant in its husks, heirloom tomatoes tie-dyed by the sun, basil sharp with summer, and dill fronds feathery as lace.

Our friends count down to this trip all year, this delicious three days of feasting and reuniting, a tradition that has become as special to us as any holiday. We book the rental in the middle of winter when the days are short and the produce aisle is a blur of potatoes and onions. By February we are already dreaming of August, when our table will overflow again.

And in the months leading up to our arrival this year, the group chat buzzed with Jessa’s updates: a sprout here, a blossom there, her smile framed by the sun and her overalls. Hers worn for purpose, mine in Brooklyn only for style.

Jessa had only recently moved back to Massachusetts after spending much of her formative twenties and early thirties in Los Angeles. In California, she hosted dinner parties that spilled over with the city’s abundance. On our video calls, she once shared an ode to west coast lettuce. The land was rich in the ways that New England was not. Figs splitting open with sugar, citrus glowing like lanterns, avocados soft enough to bruise at the touch. Under endless sunshine, she told us about new flavors, the way there was just one continuous season like a favorite song on repeat. In Los Angeles, Jessa kept pots of herbs on her balcony, growing what space allowed.

But Massachusetts called her home—the land of roadside farm stands and pick-your-own orchards, of verdant fields open to the horizon, where she could finally tend her own soil. I marvel at how naturally she bent to it, as though the spaciousness had been waiting in her all along, a garden ready to answer her care with small miracles.

Watching her, I’ve begun to understand what a patch of earth asks of us.

I stand in the season of my own possibility, but I am not yet ready to plant. I haven’t felt the pull, that restless stirring to bring something living into the world. My life feels more like fallow ground—not spent, but storing strength, holding itself quietly for the rain. I live inside the bloom of possibility, even as those I love mourn what never rose from the soil. A quiet ache runs through us: hope held, expectancy worn thin, the silence that follows loss.

And yet from that ache, something rises. Their harvest steadies me, reminding me that life insists on returning even when I feel unmoved. I watch Jessa’s hands offering what she has tended into being, and I remember what I forget: that even in stillness, green gathers strength beneath the surface, ready for the smallest chance to rise.

Maine itself reminds us too. Year after year we return to the same house, its rooms still holding echoes of our laughter and tears. We settle in quickly, dropping bags by familiar beds, unpacking groceries in the kitchen as if no time has passed.

With our first meal in front of us, what we hadn’t said on the group chat comes tumbling out, our hopes and fears tender and unhurried. Over dessert, we wonder at the stretch of days ahead of us, tracing loose arcs of what we might do into the stars. Always the idea of blueberry picking emerges, but only sometimes do we follow it. Often it feels enough—more than enough—to linger over slow starts together fortified by coffee and the smell of something warming in the oven.

That first trip in Maine, Jessa turned pounds of inky dark blueberries, the jewels of early morning foraging, into a bubbling buckle we devoured straight from the pan. I was the first to burn my tongue. Juice bled hot and sweet, the taste of late August. Later, Jessa transformed what was left into jars of jam, and for weeks after, we spread it on toast in our respective breakfast nooks across the country, remembering how good it felt to be in the same room, at the same table.

This year, Maine felt like a shaky exhale. The trip offered a respite from a world tightening with fear and fury, and from the griefs we carried, tucked quietly beside the tomatoes and bread. And so, between traipses through town and music in the background, we gathered at the table, reverent before Jessa’s offerings: chai cheesecake blondies studded with cherry gems the size of rubies, zucchini and broccolini quiche with a perfect crust rolled out by vinho verde–loosened hands, crispy caramelized ratatouille, freshly blended muhammara with green peppers still warm from the sun. Heirloom tomatoes split and salted, peaches and hand-whipped cream. A labor of love.

Every ingredient, every dish was a testament not only to summer flavor, but to care and to faith in what grows unseen before it bursts forth.

And so each meal reminded us what our friendship has always been: a circle of tending. Each year we arrive carrying what has grown since the last, the ache of loss, the astonishment of birth, the invisible work of simply continuing. We pass dishes the way we pass time itself, bittersweet, sustaining, more than enough when shared. Each tomato sliced, each berry sugared, each crust folded over with care becomes its own quiet offering: proof that life can return, fragile, fleeting, and still full of sweetness. Proof that to eat together is to believe, for a moment, in the possibility of abundance.

On our last afternoon, we ran outside, awestruck by a sky stretched wide as a canvas, painted in impossible colors. A double rainbow arched above us dazzling, as if pressing a hand to our shoulders in blessing. We laughed beneath it, our bodies still sweet with peaches, our hands still remembering the weight of plates Jessa had filled again and again. I looked at Jessa and marveled at how easily she makes beauty out of what is sown—her meals, her garden, the way she tilts her head to catch the light after rain.

But the rainbow, too, carried another meaning: the fragile promise of life after grief. Sometimes that promise is asked to return again and again, fragile but insistent, arching anyway. I thought of my own still season, how even fallow ground has its quiet work, storing strength, biding time, readying itself beneath the surface for the next beginning.

And as the rainbow faded, we turned back to what we’ve always known: each year we gather like this, and each year the table is different: new babies, empty chairs, stories still too tender to name. We set them down beside the August produce and somehow it all belongs. This summer’s harvest tasted of slower abundance—fruit sweeter for being waited on, vegetables richer for patient hands, a friend who fed us from her garden.

Here are the fruits of my labor, the meal seemed to murmur. Here is what I grew for us.

I wonder what we will bring a year from now, what will have taken root, what will have withered, what sweetness will surprise us. Will my own season still feel like waiting? This summer, when I moved, I found a community garden on my new block. I haven’t stepped inside yet, but I keep circling the gate, listening. Perhaps by next year I’ll have planted something there—small, tender, enough to carry north and set beside Jessa’s harvest.

What we plant matters. What we tend matters. And what we carry to one another—year after year, meal after meal—is what keeps us alive.

Just as we once carried jars of Jessa’s blueberry jam back to our kitchens across the country, we will carry one another’s offerings forward: the taste of what we grew, sweet, sustaining, lasting beyond the season.

-Gloria Noel

Gloria Noel is a Brooklyn-based writer whose work explores intimacy, community, and care. When she’s not writing, she works with Moms First, a nonprofit fighting for policies that support mothers and families.