I was planning on not posting anything here from major major magazines like the New Yorker, but when I came across this audio recording on Spotify of one of my favorite essays of all time…I needed to share it. I don’t care if you don’t think you care about gardening, give this piece a change. I promise you won’t regret it.
A good place to begin a garden is to undo the mistakes of previous owners. I tear up a stone walk, which occupies patches of ground feasting on sunlight. The mother cat, nursing her kittens, looks at me as if she has seen this happen before. I make a figure-eight path, irregular in the manner of handwriting, hollowing out the spaces for the stones before I water them into place and hop on them as they set.
– Alexander Chee, “The Rosary”
“The Rosary” was originally published in the New Yorker and can be found online here. It can be listened to on Spotify here. It can also be read in Alexander Chee’s wonderful collection of essays, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, which I highly recommend. He is also the author of two novels, Queen of the Night, and Edinburgh.
If You Only Read One Thing Today... 