By the time the calendar, if not the weather, turned the corner into fall, I was ready to throw in the trowel. The worst drought in 100 years, wind and extreme heat -- it was like the Gobi Desert on steroids. I hated it.

I had started out with enthusiasm, expecting that reclamation -- of the garden, the house, and my life, a kind of prep for our soon-to-be-empty nest -- was possible. In March, filled with optimism, I went a little crazy in the local nurseries. But by July, the unrelenting drought had fried my attitude along with the landscape. Instead of gardening, I trudged around grimly trying to keep things alive. We wrote off the yard, which we knew would come back on its own, but we stressed out about everything else -- especially the trees, since they're all that stands between us and total meltdown in our un-air-conditioned house.

In rotation, we trickled water into their roots, encouraging them to hang on. Our town went on water restriction, (no sprinklers) so we hauled around 5-gallon buckets to the sick and dying. But the Molly Pitcher routine was barely a finger in our two-acre dike.

We lost usually indestructible miscanthus, heuchera, cherry laurel shrubs, elder, and a 20-year-old Grimes golden apple tree. Four of six new Washington State rhododendrons turned up their toes. In addition, legions of stressed critters operated on overdrive. They devoured sweet pepper plants and rows of lettuce and beets, munched the cabbages and chomped on the chard. The 100 leeks I planted, strand by delicate strand beneath floating row covers, disappeared like something out of Children of the Corn.

There were a few survivors that clung to life -- courtesy of mulch and strategically targeted fortnightly watering. But mostly I paced like an anxious relative in a hospital corridor praying we didn't lose the patient before the fever broke. This wasn't like my annual August discouragement. This was something close to despair. I felt as though hope for the future of the earth (at least our corner of it, which is blessed with some of the best soil in the country) was drying up with the perennials. It wasn't just my own loss. Walking the farm lanes, watching the soybeans shrivel and die, I seriously wondered if any of it was even doable, let alone worth it.

Then in September, it rained. The next day, like a battle-scarred survivor, I stumbled out to the garden to survey months of damage. And I found a few botanical miracles -- Red Rubin basil protected by a San Marzano plant, a volunteer melon happily producing beneath a thatch of pig weed, and a clutch of hot peppers with beautifully striated leaves and fruits hidden in the overgrown lamb's ears.

I pulled a weed. The impulse was almost involuntary, instinctive encouragement of the garden's persistence. As I reached for another, I caught a sight of my mother's wedding ring on my finger -- a gold, three-leaf clover (Mom was a dyed-in-the-wool individualist) which I wear every day. Seeing it, I remembered her hands -- building compost in a newly planted country club suburb that all but outlawed it, mulching with fallen leaves, faithfully restoring food and water to help sustain the indigenous wildlife in a place that was destroying its habitat chunk by chunk. Her effort was a mere finger in the dike of human encroachment and she knew it. But it was her finger and her portion of the dike, and she attended to it with devotion.

As I worked my way down the bed, I found some new cilantro, self-seeded and sprung up against all odds. A week later, an annual moonflower vine, (Ipomoea alba), that I had planted with low expectations after years of failed attempts, twined up the bean pole tepee. Within days of reaching the top, it opened huge white crepe de chine flowers that perfumed the whole garden. Suddenly the horrific weather felt more like a test of resolve than a call to surrender.

Gardeners (and farmers, and mothers) are fatalists. We're rarely born that way, but we learn to accept with grace -- or at least resignation -- what we can't change. We may be discouraged, but we can't give up. Our devotion to our corner of the world is visible evidence of love, even if what we produce falls short of our hopes. So we struggle to nurture life, even against impossible odds. At heart, we're optimists. And we know there's always next year.