On Being Hot

I am sore, blistered, and tired... and hopefully triumphant. I spent most of today doing garden work, which makes for a good day, but involves heavier labor than I normally encounter in a school day. When the volunteers laid out our garden a month ago, they had extra soil, so instead of neat rows, they made us a huge plot of dirt. Fantastically fun for the kids -- we haven't put anything there yet and they still love it -- but problematic in one sense. It wasn't cleared of grass first, and, rather than dying, some of the grass grew through the layers of soil and manure.

We've spent a couple days in the garden poking at it with rakes and shovels, but removing grass is heavy labor. I know this may be hard to believe, but middle schoolers do not like heavy labor. So, someone has been procrastinating about bit of the garden project.

Today, at long last, we took care of the grass. Ana and I bought several carloads of peat moss and humus and a big ol' jug of Roundup. I attacked the grass with the weedkiller in the morning, and then we spread the dirt in the afternoon.

The 8th grade, having graduated, is gone from the school (with the exception of the quartet who showed up for no discernible reason for hours remarkably similar to those of which they often complained), but I had small army of 6th and 7th graders. The size of the corps was necessary, because somehow St. Louis skipped spring and went straight into high summer weather. Or maybe spring hit briefly in the midst of the rain and my immune system giving out on me, so I missed it. (My body decided for a while that functionality was not necessary, and I spent an awful lot of the past week and a half sleeping and struggling to breath.) No matter what happened to spring, we nearly hit 90 today... and the school has no air-conditioning.

But through the effort of two very determined and very small people, all the soil got spread. Long after the boys gave up, the smallest 6th grader and a wayward 3rd grade girl kept going until I shooed them away, afraid they'd get overheated or dehydrated. I pulled up a bunch of grass by its roots as well. If, after being sprayed, smothered, and uprooted, this grass lives on, I will find a way to crossbreed it with corn and feed a few third world nations. If not, I won't have solved world hunger, but we will be able to plant pumpkins, cantaloupes, and watermelons before school lets out!