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My wife and I take two radically different approaches to gardening. She negotiates with Mother Nature, trying to find the perfect plants which blend with the environment. I engage in acts of malicious horticulture, using poisons and sharp implements to impose my will upon the earth.

She’s all about free-form creativity and coaxing life from the soil. I’m all about applying the latest in technology.

She’s a from a Venus Flytrap and I’m from … well, oddly enough, there aren’t any plants I can find with Mars in their name.

Maybe that’s why her efforts are so much more successful than mine.

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If you like this small sample and want to hear the rest of the essay (or others like it),please visit the Short Cummings Audio website at www.shortcummingsaudio.com. You can see pictures of the wild-flower garden which inspired this essay at Picasaweb.Google.Com

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In our family we “do” Science Fair the same way other families “do” soccer…or gymnastics…or professional ice skating…or junior beauty pageants…or organized crime. We don’t so much “do” Science Fair as live it.

Our Science Fair efforts are generally divided into four phases — Planning, Production, Panic, and Performance.

Planning is easily the longest phase. It involves finding an idea which is a) unusual enough that nobody else in the fair is likely to do it, b) interesting enough to catch the eye of the judges, and c) simple enough that we can complete it without a multi-million dollar research grant and the facilities of a major university laboratory. It’s also good if the project avoids ripping holes in the space-time continuum or giving rise to dangerous new life forms or creating world-shattering new weapons systems. Of course, if a world-shattering weapon system looked possible AND would catch the judges’ eye we’d probably do it anyway.

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Recently I attended a graduation for a small class of registered nurses. There were twenty graduates, sixty invited guests and two-thousand digital cameras. If sasquatch had shambled through the auditorium we’d have had definitive photographic evidence of his existence….along with his hair color (brown), eye color (brown), and shoe-size (fifty-one triple-wide).

Each time a graduate crossed the stage, a handful of audience members popped up like meerkats emerging from their burrows — except (outside of Disney cartoons) meerkats generally don’t engage in flash photography. When the next graduate walked, an entirely different set of people popped up. The whole thing felt like a runway session at a Milan fashion show .

“Angie is wearing a black gown with a mortarboard. Perfect attire for the new graduate! Steve has chosen to accent his outfit with honor cords! Here comes Harry with a daring, backless number and the words ‘Hi Mom’ emblazoned in masking tape on his hat!”

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I built my youngest son a new dresser this week. That would be a lot more impressive if the dresser hadn’t come from the local discount store in packaging that resembled an oversize pizza box. With a little luck and some caution, it won’t actually collapse and bury him in a flash-flood of rumpled clothes.

At least it was cheap.

According to the label, my ninety-nine dollar investment bought me the Hearthwood Heirloom Chest of DrawersThe inside of the box was a different story. The construction material evidently came from the finest pressed-board forests of Europe.

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If you like this and want to hear the rest of the essay, click on the PLAY icon to the left of this message on the Short Cummings Audio website at www.shortcummingsaudio.com.