Seeds

For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,	..
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

Eliot, Prufrock



The greenhouse is filling up, emptying out, and filling up once again. Plastic trays get filled with potting soil, and a single seed gets placed, one at a time, into each cell. Then on to the next tray. The trays stack up next to my table, and then spread out in the greenhouse. The little seeds emerge from the dark soil one at a time, and open themselves to the sun. They grow and grow, and get transplanted into the fields, one at a time, down long straight rows.
Other plants will be brought to market, and sold to customers, one to this person, and one to this person. Every plant now on the greenhouse tables will find a home, one customer selecting one plastic pot, over and over.
Greenhouse days can be long. I start early and keep seeding until everything on that day's list is done. And that is sometimes long after dark - the whole day spent, one seed at a time.
I start to associate the conditions of a given day with the seeds that are started: I look at the kale and remember a cold and windy day, seated inside. I started the thyme outside, the table set up in the sun, the day marked by a rising stack of trays and the number of Cannonball Adderley CDs I worked through. The peppers I associate with Democracy Now! reporting about something from the Mid-East. I potted on the lettuce while Isiah watched "Ice Age."
I can measure out a day with basil seeds. The pace of a season is marked by plastic trays. The years are marked by the names of the interns.