I woke up this AM to a green miasma of skunk effluent permeating my house.  Again.

And upon inspecting my little orchard discovered that the bears had utterly demolished, branch and root, the last of my prized peach trees –and with it, the rest of this year’s harvest.  Again. 

When I came back in from my morning chores, I read (yet another) apocalyptic article on the depletion of the valley’s aquifers by out-of-state mega Ag conglomerates, and as I walked down to the mailbox to send off a Visa check I couldn’t afford (again,) noted that what one short generation ago was my verdant oak grove and resplendent riparian woodland now better resembles well, Venus. 

So it was in this dismal frame of mind that as I trudged back up the hill to the house musing upon the catastrophic denouement that is Afghanistan and how it should have been obvious to anyone who’d ever read Herodotus (or Alexander, or Kipling, ffs,) and how we human beings manage to fuck up everything we touch and how all our hard and well-intentioned works inevitably come to naught  — or worse– I passed my meager kitchen garden and saw. . . the TOMATOES.

Beefsteak.  Huge.  Fragrant. Velvet and scarlet and luscious. A small benediction in mockery of all the environmental carnage we have wrought. And by golly, I picked the things for my supper tonight and sniffed their earthy astringency and was grateful for my drip lines — even as I rued my complicity. Such being the human conundrum.

That is all.