I hiked up a narrow trail to reach a high
school. Imagine! Teenagers learning permaculture principles, and I was their
lunch lady. At first I served food from a box
but then they started clamoring for stinging nettle soup and
I had to warn them that the nettles don't go
anywhere tender, unless they've been cooked first. Their first assignment
was making nettle pie for principal Wheaton, but prankster Johnny
chanted "wheaton, sweet'n" and dumped a bunch of sugar in
a nearby wasps nest. Well, you can imagine the sheer
negligee the lunch lady was wearing, which made the wasps
giggle and titter, then go into swarming mode. They surrounded
the music teacher, huddled, then broke out into a rousing
, if a little buzzy and not well enunciated, round of
frisbee golf. They all could fly so they all won
the game. The students and scantily-clad lunch lady secretly
planned a surprise party for principal Wheaton with lots of
pie. Wheaton's love for pie was a mathematical constant, an
incredible 3.14--that's 3.14 pies per week--constantly. Never before
in the life of pie, was so much sliced by
a narcoleptic lunch lady and passel of permaculture students who
a text demanded my attention so I turned to look
at the view, while ignoring my phone. "This is the
dawning of the age of aquarius, the age of aquarius”