Where do babies come from?

I stopped eating meat a couple of years ago. I ate fish occasionally until I saw an episode of How It's Made. They were making fish. At the factory they had a bowl of fish eggs and a man took a male fish out of the water and squeezed it so that it's sperm came out. Then he took his gloved hand and mixed the egg and sperm up in a bowl. It seemed like a cold way to make children. Mumma cows too, I learned, weren't being fertilized the good old fashioned birds and bees way. A farmer man was doing all the work with some bull sperm that he'd taken. I'm asked all the time why I'm a vegetarian. One reason is because I prefer not to eat what hasn't had the chance to live a real sort of life.

Trees make cones. Spruce cones are beautiful. The ones with a nice fade go from cream to purple. Pine cones are silver and gold. Usually, these cones fall when the time is right, and they land on the forest floor. They crack open, under the sun's heat, and their seeds fall out on the ground. Sometimes this all works out and they grow into big healthy trees. But we cut down big healthy trees. A few machines taking down a few at a time. Some days we don't recognize where we are when we leave the block because in the morning we were surrounded by trees, and after 8 hours we're in an enormous field.

We collect these cones and sell them. Then they make baby trees with the seeds in a nursery somewhere. They grow into tiny little infants there and at the ripe age of two we plant them. It seems as though we aren't satisfied enough having our own sex, but that we must do it for the animals and plants too. The song that goes "Anything you can do I can do better; I can do anything better than you" just got stuck in my head.

The Relay Race

Sometime around June came fun day; the 21st or 22nd, weather permitting. The countdown to this day was something worthy of an advent calendar treatment, with little windows revealing chocolate in the shape of summer sports. The days before I would dream in badminton shaped bubbles and drool over set-up hoop jumping obstacles. Come the day before and I had my nike shorts laid out with my northern getaway t-shirt. Water was in the freezer, the orange wedges were cut, and my ankle socks were clean. On the morning of fun day I buzzed. Remember gatorade containers with watered down orange drink and little dentist cups?

Games on Fun Day (with a very intentional capitalization) were relay races. In the assigned teams, a soup of grade 1,2,3, and 4 students, led by a mature grade 5 leader, we would pick a team name. Team names never were and rarely are better than something like "The Awesomes" or "Team Kick Butt". I was always on the team with the most athletic people ever. The gymnasts and rep soccer forward right-wings; the kids who played captain. I slowed down the line, the first to drop the egg and the last to pass the baton, the wettest head and the emptiest bucket.

I was just filling up a pot with the water from the clogged sink of our trailer and walking it down the steps and throwing it in the bush and then walking up the steps and filling up the pot and so on and so forth and I remembered Fun Day. Parts of today are like a relay race, but not the parts where I feel like I'm slowing a team down and my teammates are bullies.

Pine Cone Picking

Job Description: Enter onto a freshly cut block and pick the pine cones from the felled pine tree tops.

Skills Needed: Some manual dexterity, the ability to lift 50 lbs on your shoulders OR the ability to drag, in a lazy fashion, 50 lbs across a cut block.

Required Equipment: Vis vest, heavy duty gloves, hard hat, burlap sack, bucket, flagging tape.

Wage: $25-or-so/20 L bucket.

Lynn's fun rating: Very poor.