Sometime in the middle of November, I was perched on a ladder cutting a dying potato vine off a trellis. Below me was the flower garden at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, or what was left of it, at least, since at that point whatever plants had not been snipped down were swiftly browning. Admittedly, it was an odd time of year to begin working for an organic gardening company, odd to learn the names of those dying perennials that I probably would not even recognize by the time they would blossom. But it was also a relief to stand atop a trellis overlooking a garden in Minneapolis.

Before moving to Minneapolis, I had passed three consecutive years in New York City, a place where Fall is not something one sees but something that is felt in the body. One does not anticipate leaves with drastic colors, such as those that line the Mississippi separating the Twin Cities, but the consistent drop in temperature recounted in weather reports and felt on the skin. Winter is another dreaded drop. The air becomes still, and as we cut through it, our steps become brisk. We can hear summer ending in them.

To complicate my seasonal handicap, the rest of my life was spent in the fractal-like town of Palm Beach Gardens, Florida; its similarity to other suburban towns the result of innumerable multiplications arising out of an elusive center that could not hold. South Florida, the strip east of I-95 rising north from Miami along the coast, was developed at a time when swamps were more readily thought of as drainable land and as mosquito-filled eyesores than as ecosystems, a word that science had not yet entered into the vocabulary. Today, it is a place where Guatemalans jump off the back of trucks in order to make brief unacknowledged appearances while manicuring the lawns of subdivisions. In Florida, it is hard to imagine myself, a white woman, as a gardener. I call my home the ugliest most beautiful place in the world.

Rachel, my supervisor at Three Seeds Gardening, was a true-blooded Wisconsinite; seasoned in some original sense of the term. She was undaunted by winter, approaching it without a sliver of trepidation as if she could see its end as soon as it had begun. I was never so calm. But perhaps this was the nature of those who spend a lot of time around plants and were from Wisconsin. For myself and other Floridians living in the North, winter always seemed highly unnatural, a mistake, a bad joke that was on us.

After knowing only sprawling suburbia and condensed cityscapes, I was surprised by the progressiveness of Minneapolis - surprised by its thirteen worker-owned collectives and its co-ops, by the numerous bumper stickers dedicated to the folk hero Paul Wellstone, but mostly, by the sheer number of home gardens in this medium-sized city in the coldest state of the union. Minneapolitans of all stripes were amazed in turn when I told them that growing up, I never knew of a single house with a real garden, with vegetables, that is, that was tended by the home's owners. They had no idea how lucky they were.