So you want to live in Park Slope Dept.:
Late one weekday morning a woman in the front yard of her near-abandoned house is struggling to keep her balance as she picks berry-like fruit from a junk tree (stink weed?) that obscures her neglected brownstone, and eats them whole one after the other.
It is hard to think of anything good that comes of tobacco. The smoking of it, that is. What seems a hundred years ago, the highest-paying summer job in my neck of the woods was tobacco-picking. Fields and fields of it, in southern Ontario, http://bit.ly/lz9jy4, the heart of the elephant, Delhi and Tillsonburg, and it was hard work, big burly farm kids preferred at the hiring halls, my tiny frame, at eighteen I’m five-eight, one-thirty, reedy as a cornstalk so I didn’t even try, but still, as a young man couldn’t imagine a life without the tobacco fields, the sail-shape leaves waving in the summer breeze, acres and acres of them.
