Blueberries

100 blueberry bushes now have a home at the Stephensen farm. I hope the sweat and backaches that went into these little plants will provide what they need to bear fruit for years to come. And if not . . . well, it sure was fun playing in the manure.

A Dream

I wake up and gulp water from my plastic water bottle, slip my feet into plastic slippers, and walk across the plastic floor to the plastic computer. I type a plastic message on my plastic keyboard and read news about plastic faces and plastic breasts. The baby is crying so I pop a plastic pacifier in her mouth and shake a plastic toy in her face before proceeding to my plastic shower with plastic containers of soaps and scrubs. I dry myself off and step onto the plastic scale, brush my plastics-straightened teeth with my plastic toothbrush. I apply plastic tubes of makeup to my not-so-plastic face and dry my hair with a plastic hairdryer. I bundle up in plastic clothes and ride my plastic bike to work, where I teach English on a plastic board with a plastic marker while sitting in a plastic chair. At the grocery store I buy crackers in individual plastic wrappers and plastic sponges and specific government plastic bags into which we throw our plastic garbage. I drop my purchases in a reusable-but-still-nylon/plastic bag and admire the wooden vinyl houses on my walk home in my plastic shoes. As the sun peeps through the smoggy plastic-polluted clouds, I stop and think to myself,

I'm melting.

I drop the the plastic bag with its plastic food and my plastic lenses fall from my melting face. I can see. My bubbling, brittle clothes shatter. I am free. I begin to run. I run to the the ends of the earth for one piece of soil that hasn't been raped by our plastic existence. I want to lay on the ground and make love to that one piece of Earth, to tell it that everything will be ok - that no one will exploit it for money or suck out its very essence to feed our gluttonous lifestyles. I want to say these things knowing they aren't true, because words are all I have now.

They aren't enough.