Today, Cathy and I sowed arugula, spinach, and turnips in our garden. As always, I thought of my parents and how they worked side by side when it came time to plant. My father marked off the rows with a one-wheeled cultivator; my mother dropped and covered the seed. I’d been the one to till the ground and work the soil down to tilth.

I hated this work when I was a teenager, but now I love the way it takes me back to my parents and reminds me of the love they maintained throughout their marriage until my father died in 1982. At that time, they’d been married nearly thirty-one years. They’d faced the hard time of the farming accident that cost my father both of his hands, a surprise pregnancy, and the challenges of raising a teenage son who caused them worry and distress during his rebellious years. Through it all, they kept working. My mother helped my father on our farm until I got old enough to fill her role. They planted large gardens, and my mother picked, and canned, and froze, and pickled. Our pantry shelves were full of jars of pickles and green beans and tomato juice. We had potatoes to last us through the winter, and strawberry preserves and freezer corn. Together, my mother and father managed our garden from seed to table, doing what had to be done to make it so.

The insects came—the tomato worms and bean beetles—and the raccoons sneaked in at night to gnaw on our sweet corn. My mother dusted and sprayed the plants to deter the insects; my father ran an electrical cord to our sweet corn patch and left a heat lamp hanging from a step ladder, hoping the light would scare the raccoons. Sometimes such measures worked, and sometimes they didn’t, but our garden was so big we hardly noticed our losses.

On this Labor Day, I think of my parents and their perseverance. They, like most farm families around us, had a stick-to-it-ness, that made them, during challenging times, hunker down and keep going. They had a stubborn refusal to accept defeat. It was one of the many valuable things I learned from my parents. The way to handle adversity was to keep working. When you want to give up, don’t. Keep going. Sooner or later, the much-needed rain will come, and the drought threatening your crops will end. Even if the rain fails to come in time to save your crops, there will be another growing season. Your heart might be breaking, but work will maintain your hope. Work is the one constant, so you keep at it because it’s the only way you know to be.

“Can’t never did nothing,” my father used to tell me when I complained about not being able to loosen a rusted nut or reach a fitting with a grease gun. He taught me there was always a work-around to accomplish a goal. You might have to work to find the strategy to overcome your obstacle, but you could trust an alternative was always there.

This blind faith, this stubbornness, this trust in the process of work—this is what I want to give all my writer friends on this Labor Day. Writing is like farming in the respect that both can break our hearts. Keep working. Have faith. Believe that something better lies on the other side of disappointment.