Dave Bonta's piece mixes prose and short haiku-like verses to show a small moral problem: growing food often means displacing the animals already living there. The speaker admits that this uncomfortable truth once turned him away from gardening, a passion of his youth. Then the pandemic keeps him stuck in Pennsylvania, and his wife, writing from London, suggests he plant vegetables. He agrees happily, eager to get his hands in the soil.
But the good mood gets complicated. Setting fence posts disturbs baby bunnies, and the neighbor's plowing sends a vole running, "all fur and panic." The two haiku echo this tension. In the first, pulling out wild onions in an onion bed hints at how even cultivation involves removing something wild. In the second, the wind whistling through the new fence suggests a boundary has been built. The mood is gentle and wry, but touched with guilt, as the speaker's pleasure meets the plain cost of making a garden.