I say “autumn,” you say “fall.” Obviously, I’m right. But maybe we can compromise with “harvest,” the season’s traditional name. At this time of year, anyway, what one really needs is adjectives, and “fall-like” just won’t do.

Like virtually every bookish child in the Western world, I inherited certain lessons from Laura Ingalls Wilder. Reading the “Little House on the Prairie” series as a girl, I believed three things: that my future womanly waist would be small enough for Pa’s hands to encircle; that snow could freeze maple syrup into delightful snacks; and that the secret to security and happiness lay in preserving fruits and vegetables for winter.

There’s nothing wrong with optimism, as long as you don’t get your hopes up. If one really wants something, it’s easy to put doubts aside. This time will be the exception; bad boyfriends changed into princes, strangely easy childbirth, jars of honey waved through in our carry-on luggage . . . surely, for me, it’ll work out.

My Hungarian-Czech grandmother, an otherwise goodhearted and generous woman, had a notoriously lax attitude toward property rules: bank pens, ashtrays, and hospital slippers all were fair for the taking.

Don’t worry; it’s perfectly normal. You live in a city, but nurse secret fantasies of growing your own supper: brimming handfuls of sweet green peas, squeakingly fresh spinach; new potatoes rolling like unearthed treasure over the soil.

Once upon a time, like most sane people, I was utterly uninterested in gardening. I wasted my time and money on reasonable things: secondhand books, dramatic spices, jackets that I hoped might transform me into the well-groomed and self-possessed novelist I still intend, one day, to become.

Haven’t you heard the stories of gardeners who, after a single rose-thorn puncture, lost an arm, or more? It’s not that I hate roses. I will acknowledge that, in certain circumstances—breeze-ruffled in the lilac dusk of a Provençal evening, say, or trained by generations of grateful college servants against honeyed Oxford limestone—a rose can achieve glory: the platonic ideal of flowers.

Dear famous gardening writers: please shut up. Of course you mean well. We, your tentative, inexperienced readers, shy of hosepipe and clumsy of secateur, appreciate your attempts to make our lives more beautiful. We share your fantasies of roses, zinnia, clematis; of bowers laden with grapes and pomegranates, or cool spaces for entertaining, with creative seating solutions and solar lighting.