we live close to some fields that are being farmed, and we have awakened 6-7 times in the last two weeks to the sound of low-flying aircraft buzzing back and forth across these fields. slightly dismayed by the idea that these planes are spraying who-knows-what toxic crap several hundred yards from our open-windowed home.

mb decided one morning to find out what the planes are doing, so she drove over toward the fields and flagged down the mail carrier to find out who the fields belong to. the mail carrier sent her to a car dealership to find a man, who sent her to another dealership to find another man. this man has serious hearing loss, but mb managed to find out that this man is renting out his fields to sharecroppers who are farming rice and that this man assumes those planes are cropdusters associated with the rice farming. He tells her not to worry and that whatever is being sprayed is likely harmless, although he does recall that last year all his pecan trees near his house and the fields suddenly died. all this against the background that we think that ours is one of only two houses on our street in which someone doesn’t have some sort of cancer. mb was considering making an offer to buy the farmland (with what money, we didn’t know).

a few days later, we discovered that many/most/all of the early morning flights are associated with a nearby flight school and unlikely to be cropdusters. so we presently own no farmland, unless you count the nascent vegetable garden.

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