What will society be like three hundred years from now here in good ol' the Mitten State? I'm having the best time speculating. Bio-genetics! Time-shifting! High school entrance exams! Chocolate!
It's all coming to a Great Lake near you.
One of the reasons I really love this story (and keep coming back to it) is that it reminds me in some complex non-linear way of a conversation I had with my then boyfriend** about Israelis, nation-building and plastic buckets.
Like this one.**
He was in Israel, studying Hebrew and picking apples at a bare-bones kibbutz on the Lebanese border shortly before the Litani Operation, and was taken with how plastic buckets were used for all sorts of vital, nation-building activities---milking goats; carrying babies; storing ammunition. People turned them over and used them as stools at the dinner table, took them out to the bomb shelter at night in case they had to---well. They even used them to pick apples***
The lowly plastic bucket. A linchpin of Mid-Eastern family, commerce and society****. Who knew?
The same sort of deal is going on in the gentle sort of world-building of my story,***** My plastic buckets include the aforementioned bio-genetics and chocolate, of course---but also schools made of Time and Light; north-county woods crammed full of gnats and bears.
And a very bad motorcycle accident.
It's quite an idea,isn't it? Trying to figure out when there's enough plastic buckets in the backstory of your world building? Public transportation...the juvenile detention system... a national beverage.*******
I was going to wind this up with a poignant (but funny!) meditation on life, the world and our work here in the wide world of kiddie lit, but I decided that sending y'all over to this site would be a fitting close----because of course it is a great example of an entire world being built----one ugly, dysfunctional and flimsy piece o' plastic at a time---right! this! second! everywhere around us.********
Enjoy!
___________
*been working on it since 2005. It's either gonna flop or be my best one yet!
**now husband
***plastic bucket, not Israeli.
****after a nice sanitary wash, I'm sure.
*****You also need duct tape and a squarish plastic dish-pan sort of thing, according to the Israeli kibbutzniks of the early 'eighties.
******cleverly entitled A Long Time from Now. And why am I using so many footnotes this morning? the sun is shining; it doesn't seem particularly like a footnoting sort of day. (but I digress).
*******vodka! (Thanks, Priscilla!)
********who would intentionally buy this stuff anyway? Not me. And yet, my cupboards are filled to bursting with plastic crap.
