I spent yesterday evening at a gardening lecture, held in the barn up the hill. I had understood the topic of the lecture to be about landscaping with native plants, something that I am currently trying to do in our yard, but it ended up being two and a half hours of slides about trees. Strangely, it was still very compelling. Many of the trees were exquisitely beautiful, for one thing. But most of the reason I stayed for the whole talk was due to the personality of the lecturer, a gardener from a nursery specializing in native plants. He reminded me more of the dyed-in-the-wool New Englanders I would occasionally encounter when I lived in the northeast than of your typical Midwestern nursery owner. He was very opinionated in a way that agreed with absolutely nobody � he refused to jump on the organic gardening bandwagon, and at the same time had a number of negative things to say about what he kept calling �the reality of the nursery industry.� Rather, his statements were entirely practical, �do what works.� I liked that immediately. He clearly had a poetic soul, but he had a unique talent for butchering metaphors and and for inappropriate verbiage. �That�s another misnomer,� he frequently announced when some incredulous suburbanite questioned his growing techniques � he meant �myth.� �That�s like putting all your eggs in a row.� The best statement of the night, though, was completely incomprehensible. Someone had asked about landscaping of golf courses (oy!). His response, word for word (I wrote it down immediately) was as follows: �It�s like growing grass on the edge of a sword. It�s like putting it between the Devil�s advocate and life!� I can�t imagine what he could possibly have intended to say, but I love the idea of being between the Devil�s advocate and life. Where is that, exactly? Between false truth and reality? Between death and life? In purgatory? All of the above? It�s giving me a whole new idea about the game of golf.

I�ll be working my ass off this morning trying to finish everything to do with the first two weeks of classes and my conference paper before the craziness hits. Afterwards, I�m heading into AJ�s class to read a story to all the kiddies � kind of a funny intro to standing in front of my college students next week. I wonder who�ll be better behaved?

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