Service Adventure - J O H N S T O W N

Here in this new community, as I'm confronted by new lifestyles and opinions, I'm realizing how I have grown up thinking. I see from the oldness of our house, that I was accustomed to new. Our late suppers show me that my family usually eats early. My tendency to wear shorts while everyone else wears jeans tells me how acclimated I've become to warm Virginian summers. On a more telling level, the deficit of musical heritage around me shows me how special my musical community at home is. My surprise at people's opinions shows my ignorance to other ideas. My abundance of stupid questions concerning German culture display my true lack of international knowledge. Difference, though not my preference, puts me in a place to learn, and I assume my graduated peers must also be learning this in college. However, though these differences in my surroundings and in the people around me can teach me a lot about myself and in the wide, wide world beyond me, they do not make relatio...

I faced a sea of riotous tomato vines, and I mean vines. They grew low to the ground unsupported and untrimmed, rooting wherever there was a hole in the plastic,  weaving between branches of other tomato plants and looking all the while more like a thousand plants than just a few score. I would carefully wade in and begin pulling out the leggy branches tracing back to the root, knife in hand almost like a savage. After pounding in a post with many loud clangs of a post driver, I'd stretch the long, heavy branches up tying them with cotton thread. One plant could have at least a dozen offshoots that had grown taller than I, radiating out from the base in all the directions, and then more equally thick and healthy offshoots off that; too many to tie up to one post. In most cases, I'd cut out more mass than I left behind tied up, ripping or slashing out the unnecessary branches heaping the broken stems in a pile to the side. The air smelled like crisp, tomato flesh. My hands turne...