If you live the gardener’s existence you’ll come to know a force of evil that pesticides can’t kill, an enemy that simply cannot be defeated. To get to the water, to experience the blossoms or the fruit, to get to truly know Mother Nature or commune with the leafy botanical miracles described in the Farmers’ Almanac you’ll have to run the tangled gauntlet that haunts the souls and green thumbs of every poor sap with dirt under his nails or a red burn on the back of his neck.
There was a time when people relied on the town square. They may have called it the village green or the market square or the piazza. They would have come to exchange information or to gather the news of the day, and public notices would have been posted and important dates would have been pinned to the pole or kiosk or shelter in the square. The town square was the engine of commerce and served as a communications hub long before anyone had the notion of anything more complex than a bulletin board.
I generate large clouds of cigar smoke, curling purplish-gray churning vapor streams, and most people hate me for it. Actually, they probably hate me for other reasons and just blame it on the cigar smoke. They make faces at me, sometimes they give me the finger, they make those dismissive noises that people make when they’re disgusted at aspects of society that infringe upon their breeding and their sense of entitlement. They can handle the litterbug and the panhandler, they’ll look the other way at people who take up two parking spaces or gals who speak in high-pitched voices into their iPhones because their conversations about the PTA need to be shared with the general public, but they’ll seek out the cigar smoker ten blocks away to tell him he’s the main cause of global warming.