I take pleasure

There's a crevice in my oak desk that catches my pencil when I draw. Rubbed with graphite it makes a long, tidy row.










I take pleasure in orderly crop rows, lines of young peas arching lyrically over a hill, tasseled corn tops like sentinels prepared for march. These patterns are marked deeply in me. They’re the aesthetic of my first 22 years.

Home was south-central Minnesota. At 19 I spent three months employed by the agricultural superhero of the Midwest. The Jolly Green Giant handed me a set of keys to a pick-up truck and a map of colossal proportions. I was sent out to collect writhing, fluttering specimens from a patchwork of fields that blanket the lower third of the state.

My job title was Pest Control Technician. On less aggrandizing terms, I was a lowly bug collector. I hunted corn borers, stink bugs and cutworms, then plucked them from their homes on the underside of cornstalks and pea shoots. With the glass jar beside me in the passenger seat, I rattled back over gravel roads, through sleepy townships and back to headquarters in Le Seuer, MN.