Weeding all day: good work, but long. Strange muscles in my fingers are sore now, and I've gathered a new crop of sunburns and bugbites. Witchgrass had nearly overtaken the lettuces (the red one with the frilly edges is New Red Fire, the green one is Nevada, the red one with the midrib is Magenta, the oak-leaf is Brunia, the green butter-leaf is Silvesta and the last one is Red Tide). It took both of us together an hour and a half per row to clear the weeds out, then another half-hour to tame the re-may and get everything covered. Everything is dry; the rainstorms last weekend were the last we got, and one big storm they had predicted never materialized. We rushed out to put in a few more rows of transplants, believing in that rain that never came. They're near to dead now, and we don't have the time to water.

There is the theory that we got kicked out of Eden on account of the gardening. Farming can be a lot like playing God, and maybe he didn't like the competition. We're rainmakers, we're murderers, we're midwives, all. And we do rather more killing than life-giving, all told.

"This is a wire-worm. Kill it." And I do, slicing it in half with my fingernail, smudging myself with its pasty insides. We prune the tomatoes, hard, so many eager shoots sent to compost. In Arizona, twice I'd turned over with the flat blade of my shovel fat toads like clods of dirt, buried in the wet soil where the kale had been. Amazing that I didn’t chop them in half, lunging as I was blindly into the ground, where they hid blindly from the heat. I gathered them up in my hands, cold and still and strangely electric, and took them to the mint patch by the leaky hose, dropped each one into the puddle there and hoped the dog wouldn’t come by.

One time the dog killed a chicken when Kevin left the coop door open. We all stopped our planting to look over towards the sound of fear of death, outraged rooster, Kevin hollering at the dog to stop, stop, stop.

We took the chicken to the old classroom, three walls made of pallets and a trellis roof and a tarp. On the table, which was plywood on a stack of buckets, we plucked and cleaned and butchered the chicken which we thought was a rooster until we cut it open and found an egg inside.

One egg whole, in its shell: tomorrow’s egg. Beside it a yolk covered in a cobweb of bright veins, and beside that a smaller yolk, smaller and smaller down to the size of oats, or gravel; a constellation of potentiality.

The chicken was still warm when we cut it open; so different from a fish which is cold even before it dies. All day there were feathers and the smell of blood about me.

Once I almost chopped a baby rabbit in half, slicing at thistles with a scythe. We pulled gophers out of the traps by the dozens, tossed them on the compost heap with the weeds and the edges of bread from our lunch. Dead mice swarmed with ants in the outhouse; dead birds in the nesting boxes, live birds pulling young corn out by the root so that we must plant again, again, again. The bindweed choked the beans, the coyote gourd sank its deep root between my watermelons so that I pulled them up by mistake, and the blister beetles on the leaves of the eggplant were always stuck to each other in a miserable ecstasy of copulation and burnt my fingers when I smashed them.

Farming is systematic war as much as it is anything. Or: life is death as much as it is anything. The force of the cycle asserts itself bodily into the daily actions of living. We eat last summer's harvest, frozen and canned, last summer's chickens in neat plastic bags. We eat thinnings and sometimes weeds as they are pulled from the soil. We plan the death of the mean rooster. We crush wire-worms, cabbage loopers, grasshoppers if we can catch them. We muck the chicken coop. We live in a camper, and once a week our fresh water tank must be filled from the well and our blackwater tank dumped into the septic system. We are acutely, sometimes unpleasantly, aware of the inputs and outputs of most every aspect of our lives. We are wading through death and shit and so are you.

So are you.