Homeland and Other Stories by Barbara Kingsolver Page B

a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn’t do.
    Diatomaceous earth, by the way, isn’t dirt. It’s a remarkable substance made up of the jagged silicon skeletons of thousands of tiny sea creatures. It feels to a human hand like talc, but to insects it’s like rolling on broken bottles. It lacerates their skin so the vital juices leak out. This is a fearful way to die, I’m sure, but as I sprinkled the white powder around the leaves on that spring day I wasn’t thinking about the insects. I was thinking of eggplants, heavy and purple-black in the midsummer sun. I believe that try as we might to see it differently, life nearly always comes down to choices like this. There is always a price. My elderly neighbor is fond of saying, as he stands at his mailbox riffling through the bright-colored junk mail: “If there’s something on this earth that’s really for free, I’d pay everything I got to know what it is.”
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    Lena thought that rather than just hypothesizing it might be a good idea for us actually to try out a baby for a weekend. Themore I thought about it, the more reasonable it seemed. In fact, I thought maybe it ought to be a requirement. In any event, our friends the MacElroys were happy to oblige us with their daughter Melinda. They offered to drop her off Friday evening, and head post-haste for Chicago.
    MacElroy teaches zoology and has an office next to mine. Our college is small; the biology department is comprised solely of the two of us, one ambassador each from the plant and animal kingdoms. MacElroy came here from a state university, and thinks this is extremely amusing. Sometimes in the restroom he will stand at the next urinal and say, “Shall we convene a departmental meeting?”
    What is not a joke, to the MacElroys, is that at the age of twenty months Melinda still doesn’t walk. At first they were evasive, saying, “She’s shy about walking.” This soon eroded into outright defensiveness, and from there they went the sad route of trying everything, from specialists in pediatric orthopedics to “Ask Dr. Gott.” All the tests that money can buy have been run on Melinda. The doctors all say the same thing: that she is fine, bonewise, and that every child has her own timetable. And still the MacElroys entertain nervous visions of Melinda packing her bags someday and crawling off to college.
    Early on Friday afternoon, Lena called me from her office at Poison HQ. “What have you got for the rest of the day?” she asked.
    â€œOffice hours,” I said.
    â€œWhat’s the chance some student will drop in?”
    â€œThere’s a chance,” I said. I looked around my desk and considered the odds. I have ferns and bromeliads in my office, a quietly carnivorous Darlingtonia , a terrarium full of the humid breath of mosses. I spend a good deal of time alone with them. “A meteor could strike the Science Building, too,” I said.
    â€œI’ve traded shifts with Ursula so we can play hooky for theafternoon.” Lena sounded breathless. “We might as well enjoy our last hours of freedom, before we take on the awesome responsibilities of a child,” she said. Less than ten minutes after hanging up the phone, she was honking the horn outside my office. We set out for the Covered Bridge Festival.
    I should explain that this is not a festival in any normal sense, but a weekend during which the residents of southern Indiana drive about celebrating the fact that there are numerous covered bridges in the vicinity. One can enjoy them in any order. My own favorite is the one at Little Patoka, on the Eel River.
    â€œOne of the pros,” Lena said as she frowned slightly over the steering wheel, “is that our schedules are so flexible. I could always arrange my shift on the poison line around your classes.”
    â€œAssuming your staff doesn’t all have a