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.