We've been out here for hours,

digging carrots out of cool, black soil. Wind gusts through bare branches as the afternoon air starts to cool down. Looking up from the carrots, across the landscape, there is little color left on the trees a mile away. Karina, at the end of the row, is singing in Spanish, and the wind kindly brings the sound over to me. My brain has sprung a small leak. A voice from the back of the head wishes to attend an anti-war protest tomorrow, but the frontal lobe knows darn well that the post-market nap will happen. That voice never quite shuts up, and the earthworms emerging from the clods I flick off carrots beg me to help protect their soil-bourne brethren across the globe. As I dig more carrots, pulling them straight up to prevent them from breaking, I try to explain that congress abdicated its right to say no to war. And then the scumbags wanted my vote to stay in office. I apply leverage to the digging fork and gently pry my ballot off the punchcard machine, having said "HELL NO!" Organic matter should have the right to declare war, because it won't roll belly up every time the president crosses his eyes at it. 100% of earthworms agree that Hairy Vetch should be elected to congress, and that's a candidate I could sure get behind.

I brush the soil off a fat carrot to find two, wrapped around each other. Pulled apart, they retain a rigid spiral shape. Unsellable, they clean off nicely for for a tasty, frost-enhanced snack. We could grow all the carrots we need here in the Midwest, because were guaranteed frost and California isn't, and then we wouldn't have to use that oil we have to go to war for to ship them out east. But that would make sense, and cross-country shipping has turned Senatorial tops yellow, just how the president likes them. So, why should I feel guilty for sleeping through the war protest because I'm butt-tired after the market, when the people who could have stopped another pointless war chickened the fuck out? We applied leverage, and rewarded those who stood up on their own with votes and retained seats. Those that stayed in the mud got snapped in half when the president yanked them out at a sharp angle. I look at my row of pulled carrots, waiting to have their tops snapped off, and I see them carrying protest signs, and know I'll join them again, eventually.

The sky puts on a brilliant show as we leave, with bright orange morphing to red leaping out from behind thin grey clouds. The sunset takes up the whole sky, and the sound of the wind must now compete with the noise Karina and I are making about how great the sky is.