Adding injury to insult, women's bodies respond to stress differently than do men's. They pour out higher levels of stress hormones and fail to shut off production readily. The female sex hormone progesterone blocks the normal ability of the stress hormone system to turn itself off. Sustained exposure to stress hormones kills brain cells, especially in the hippocampus, which is crucial to memory.

Damn it.

Hooray, my ShoutOuts are back!

Today: exactly one month until my birthday. To celebrate I succeeded in getting kicked by not one but two horses, severely scratched by a cat and some carnivorous raspberry bushes, cracking my jaw, receiving the bill for the next school year, and bruising the bottoms of both feet by stepping barefoot on sharp rocks. Conclusion: today was not my day.

Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the power to turn a life around.

~Leo Buscaglia

The beans have finally discovered that the poles are there for their aid and have chosen vertical growth over vapid horizontal hovering. Once on their way, they go up like a shot, seeking sunlight and clinging limpet-like to whatever surface presents itself. There are flower clusters starting on the most ambitious of the potato plants (killed five more potato beetles et ova today), and the morning glories are putting out their delicate blue flowers, white star of mystery in the center.

Few places are more peaceful than a barn in the early morning, before the rest of the household begins to stir. The air smells pleasantly of hay and horse, and the inhabitants whicker softly at the entrance of She Who Bringeth Food. Outside there is no sound but the birds, and the sunlight glances down and turns the fields to gold. I go about the daily chores of feeding, mucking out, changing water, and all the other tasks that horses bring with them, all the while thinking about the way I felt riding yesterday, when May was a four-legged extension of myself. There is always a link.

What does one do with twenty-five spare feet of heavyweight tow chain?

we're through, he told her
packed his things
went to the door expecting
her to block his path, protest
it's over
no
but she
stood to the side, smiled and
corrected his grammar

God damn you movie star, can't you just stay a minute more?

"They tell me I eat too many pickled eggs," Wirf finally continued. "The stuff they pickle the eggs with is dangerous. Eats away at your liver."

Sully nodded. "Especially if you wash each one down with about a gallon of beer."

"Especially," Wirf said.

"Well," Sully said. "You could cut back on your pickled eggs."

Wirf shrugged, then shook his head sadly. "The time to cut down on the pickled eggs was about five years ago. Ten, maybe. They tell me that my liver is irreversibly pickled. They don't like to say it right out, but I gather that it doesn't make much difference anymore whether I zig or zag."

Sully shook his head, feeling much of the same frustration he'd felt two days ago listening to Cass, who'd explained to him her lack of options with regard to her mother. Here was Wirf telling him the same thing, that he was damned if he did, damned if he didn't. Maybe Sully's young philosophy professor at the college had been right. Maybe free will was just something you thought you had. Maybe Sully's sitting there trying to figure out what he should do next was silly. Maybe there was no way out of this latest fix he'd gotten himself into. Maybe even the trump card he'd been saving, or imagined he was saving, wasn't in his hand at all. Maybe his father's house already belonged to the town of Bath or the state of New York. Maybe Carl Roebuck had bought it at auction for back taxes.

There was a certain symmetry to this possibility. Maybe Carl had used the money he refused to pay him and Rub as the down payment. Who knew? Maybe even Carl Roebuck didn't have any choices. Maybe it just wasn't in him to be thankful for having money and a big house and the prettiest woman in town for his very own. Maybe he was just programmed to wander around with a perpetual hard-on, oozing charm and winning lotteries. Maybe. Still, Sully felt the theory to be wrong. It made everything slack. He'd never considered life to be as tight as some people (Vera came to mind for one, Mrs. Harold for another) made it out to be, but it wasn't that loose either.

"So what's your plan?" he asked Wirf.

Wirf shrugged. "I don't know," he admitted. To Sully's surprise, Wirf didn't sound all that discouraged. "Maybe I'll just keep zigging til I can't zig any more. I can't even imagine zagging at this late date."

Sully nodded. "How many more years of zigging do they figure?"

"Months," Wirf said. "If I continue to zig. If I zag, I might get a year or two. A little more. We all end up at the Waldorf-Astoria, Sully. Zigging or zagging. I'm not that afraid. At least not yet," he added. "In fact, I wasn't afraid at all until we started this conversation."

Sully stood, said he was sorry for bringing it up, which he was.

"That's all right," Wirf said. "I've been wondering when you'd say something."

Sully suddenly felt awash in guilt for not having seen it earlier, for not paying attention, or the right kind of attention.

"Where you off to?" Wirf wanted to know.

"Home, for once," Sully said. The idea of spending another long night at The Horse was suddenly insupportable. He'd been hoping to find someone to help him steal Carl Roebuck's snowblower, but it was just himself and Wirf, and he didn't see how enlisting another one-legged man would improve his chances. "See if I can plan my next move."

"I hope this doesn't mean you won't be zigging with me anymore."

Sully assured him this was not the case. "Maybe we should cut back, though," he said. "Without giving it up entirely."

"Hmmm." Wirf nodded thoughtfully. "Zigging in moderation. An interesting concept. I like it as an alternative to cowardly zagging."

Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

I have come across no greater craftsman of blue-collar heartache than Richard Russo. His depictions of poverty-stricken small towns and the dichotomy between their equally poverty-stricken inhabitants and their wealthy ones are so lifelike as to have walked directly out of the page and onto the street. The broken home and disrupted family, the root causes of arguments and dissatisfaction with life, and an insightful look into the very nature of the human heart bring a poignancy and humor to his works and utter credibility, empathy, and lovability to his characters. Most recently, Russo's talent for displaying the great gap between old and young has caught my eye. What the young mean and how the old perceive it, and vice versa; often two very different viewpoints. Thus the concerned child, now middle-aged and trying to do right by the old folks, appears merely intrusive to the elderly parent, the independent parent stubborn and intractable to the child. What is it about age that defies understanding? The old no longer identify with their 40-year-old selves, the young don't realize that the old expect to be allowed to live out the rest of their lives according to the patterns that have earlier been set.

This was what Miss Beryl had been coming back to, all day, all her life probably, to the mystery of affection, of the heart inclining in one direction and not another, of its unexpected, unwished-for pirouettes, its ability to make a fool, a villain, of its owner, if indeed any human can be said to own his heart. "I know this," she'd told Clive Sr. that long-ago afternoon. "Love is a stupid thing." It was, then and now, her final wisdom on the subject.

Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

Further inspirations from the weedbed.

A man for whom I otherwise have a great deal of respect once informed me that the meaning of life was to leave the world a better place for your children. I grant that this is a very noble aspiration and I wish him luck. But really, what sort of impossible task is that? Children are infamous for never doing what their parents want them to do in the first place, let alone appreciating love's labour's lost once the elder generation has laid down the torch. How many proverbs rise to mind of squandered inheritances, estranged children, wasted educations?

If the purpose of life is indeed something to do with our offspring, I think that the only efforts we can honestly put forward are to prepare our children as best we can for what comes ahead. We can arm them with the tools we think they may need, but only they have the power to shape their own circumstances. We may indeed leave the world a better place for them, but it's up to them what they do with it, and if the precedent of the human race is anything to judge by, there will be plenty of fiascoes before things even begin to teeter back onto a reasonably even keel. It's foolish to think that by our actions we can prevent the foolishness of others, because the human mind is a wonderfully creative and monumentally stupid organ. We'll all muddle through somehow.

The plants figured this out ages ago. All they do is work into the soil and break it up, then flower, fruit, and die, leaving behind a nutritive and fertile area where their successors may or may not choose to take root. If that's your idea on the meaning of life, then I say look no further than what's at your feet.

On the potato beetle:

The Colorado potato beetle, Leptinotarsa decemlineata, a black-and-white striped member of the leaf beetle family, especially destructive to the potato plant et familia. As its name suggests, it was once native only to the Midwest, where it is to be supposed they grew a lot of potatoes, having little else to do whilst waiting for the corn. When the Irish potato famine created demand for potatoes all across the country and into Europe, these invertebrate stowaways spread across the world and now plague innocent gardeners of all sorts. It is a curious phenomenon to observe the relationship between potato plant and potato beetle. A potato plant is one of the most contradicting symbols in the gardening sphere. Sprouting anywhere in a tilled area, it says: Verily, there will come Fruition, yea, and slightly fuzzy dark green plants with bunched leaves in odd places upon the stems in keeping with the Fertile Character of the Garden. Promise of Future Nourishment will be manifest. And the Colorado potato beetle will also be manifest, which is where the rot sets in. The potato beetle is ubiquitous, omnipresent. No matter how clean the seed potato, how completely scoured of pests and weeds your garden is, and how many centuries it's been since a potato plant was last in your garden, the moment the current plant hits three inches you will find a potato beetle upon it. Perhaps a cluster of orange eggs, if you're very lucky. Their sole purpose in life is to thwart the growth of your potato plants. They see growth, they thwart. It's natural. I just wish I knew where the hell they appear from.

I rather thought that with the end of the school year, and as a result the end of our esteemed professor's near-silent but ever-watchful critique, this weblog would merely fade into extinction, an event far less sudden than that of the dinosaurs and yet not so insidiously slow as that of the ozone or the Brazilian rainforests. Therefore imagine my surprise, dear reader, when a long-lost audience member emailed me to complain about the discontinued, albeit intermittent, stream of haphazard fluff that has issued from my fingers (sometimes without benefit of stopping in the brain on the way by). Why wasn't I still writing? in the aggrieved tones of one who has lost something very dear indeed. Poor deluded soul. I note, however, with interest, that several of my fellow classmates have continued to add to their modest creations as well, and I have been shamed by association into joining their number. At least for tonight.

The question now becomes, what to write about? Pivotal issues of text, hypertext, the role of auther and reader, and interpretation given the exploded parameters of the electronic word are no longer the battering ram against my bastion of traditional literature. Class has let out and teacher is no longer watching. Unless of course he too has not given up the chance to come and sigh beside the arid streambeds of my one-time garden of intellectual fruit, in which case I apologize most feelingly, and also remind him with a grin that Paideia never did worry about the proprieties inherent in a graded project.

Speaking of gardens, I was out in mine today ripping quackgrass up by the pallid roots and reflecting upon the nature of life, or at least the facet of it that would find me bent over and baking gently in the sun while my trusty spading fork and I labored away. It's circular, you know. Life, I mean, not the spading fork. When I got tired of grassroots I mulched the pole beans, and was reminded of the similar epiphany I'd had two years earlier. I'd been working on the farm at the Chewonki Foundation after finishing my semester there, and one of the many things we'd accomplished had been tilling up and creating a new seedbed inside one of the greenhouses. We'd planted it with green beans, and when my grandmother brought me an article about Chewonki a few months later, I couldn't help but see that the 8 by 10 glossy on the front page depicted the latest batch of students: in a greenhouse, picking beans. Those were my beans. I had sweated and labored over every part of those beans' existence, from the dirt they grew in to the water that had nourished them to the very seeds that they had sprung from. And now they were being picked by the very students that would eat them, probably later that night in one of Lauren's culinary concoctions. I too had eaten beans there, the children of some other farm worker's labor, and here they were again, poking their little green heads into my world. Just then a deerfly bit me and I stopped rhapsodizing over the beans. The present ones were a different kind anyway.

You think about life differently when you're faced with a plot full of quackgrass. You're aware of it, in a more tangible and vibrant sense than usual. You can smell the earth (and yourself) warm in the sun, see the bright living green of the plants you're busy saving and smell the sharp sap of the weeds you're busy killing. For an afternoon you play God, there in your garden, creating order from chaos, raining down judgement on the wicked, and paving the way for the meek to inherit the earth. Though if you've ever grown anything as tendrilly as pole beans and morning glories you'll know that they're far from meek once they get going. Time doesn't matter anymore, because plants don't rely on numbers or days of the week, they simply grow and reproduce and die, bearing fruit for those that survive them. In a basic sense we are all plants. Or perhaps I've simply got too much dirt in my ears.