I’m a wannabe Westerner, a city girl in search of greener pastures, always climbing trees just to get high, climbing the mountain to see what I can see. My father claims that my first word was “horse,” an unfortunate choice on my part since I grew up in Manhattan—not the town fifteen miles from where I live now in Bozeman, Montana, but the island between the Hudson and East rivers.
So it’s got to be one of life’s great ironies that here in the wide open West, I’m struggling to raise vegetables on a small urban lot with more than its share of trees. Is this fair? Is this right? I mean, really. I spend my NYC childhood reading Laura Ingalls Wilder and dreaming of the West, and I finally get here, I make it, I SUCCEED, and here I am, in a quintessentially Western town, all ranches and skiing, and I have less space than I did at my halfway-to-Montana house, in Minnesota.
Nonetheless, I persevere—bravely, nobly, humbly.
—Kate Gardner
Please e-mail me at themanicgardener@gmail.com.
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