You Read What You Sow

A gardener surveyed his field and saw his crops languishing. His field was an open book, with what he had nourished and cultivated presenting as a library of sorts that held his life's work. But it had not rained for the longest time. He fretted.

He wheeled his wheelbarrow into his house and followed hallowed halls to his study. He left a trail of dirt that dropped from the rolling single, front wheel, like a trail of bread crumbs, as if he had planned to retrace his steps were he to become lost.

He reached for books on his shelf: the Oxford Dictionary, which took up most of the space of his wheelbarrow, and piled upon its volumes a thesaurus, a copy of William Espy's "Words at Play," a poetry book by Shel Silverstein, and Douglas Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach." He considered the Bible, but declined.

"As long as folks can't decide whether it's fact or fiction..." he said out loud. "I'll wait until it's decided. Until then, my garden will be true — nonfiction. Verily! And verifiable." (He considered Silverstein nonfiction.)

He struggled but was able to wheel the books back along the crumb trail, retracing his steps to his garden, where he matched his own and that of the fields, growth-for-growth.

He opened his Oxford dictionary to the P. He gathered into his hands potting, and then from the S, seeds and saplings, and sense and sensibility.

From his thesaurus he sowed atop the seeds his fertilizer, manure, waste, dung, and excrement. His Silverstein got the chemistry right.

Via his Hofstadter, he plowed with machinations; from his Silverstein, he watered the entire field with irony, satire, and truth masquerading as allegory. His Espy allowed sprinkles of spoonerisms, oxymorons, and puns.

Then, by the grace of God, it rained. It rained poignancy, clarity, humor, sarcasm, endearment, and peace and discord.

When the man came back to check his fields, he was thrilled. "This," he exclaimed, "is a crop worth reaping! What I have sowed!"

And strangely, both fiction and fact, history and lore, comedy and drama, and, verdantly splendid, his life works.

"Finally," he said, "I am a writer!"