Select Entry- Mary Hunt Webb, Age 58

Welcome to our Optimistic Essay category. Here you will find the $1,000 winning contest essay, 5 finalist essays and 15 honorable mention essays and a growing list of hand-picked select essays that readers submitted during our "Why Are You Optimistic About the Future?" contest.

"Plucky Plants Display Spunk"

Plants give me hope. I watch their behavior and I take encouragement from the way they act.

For example, the packet says to wait until all chance of frost is past before planting lettuce seeds. However, the seeds that dropped on the ground from the previous year's crop started to push through the soil long before the average date of the last frost.

When I lived in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where the growing season is only 90 days long, a friend advised me to get an early start.

"After you have lived here a while," she advised, "you will learn to throw lettuce seeds out on top of the snow!"

That was many years ago and I have since learned an important lesson about the instructions on seed packets.

Seeds can't read.

Consequently, they have no regard for the limits that others try to impose on them. They often grow under the most improbable conditions, just as people do. Plants frequently grow among rocks and sand where they shouldn't grow at all.

Accordingly, a chamomile blossom has already begun to poke its dainty head up among the rocks on the barren north side of my driveway without regard for the fact that it's January! When I first planted chamomile year before last, the directions on the envelope said to plant the seeds

after all danger of frost had passed. Last year, I noticed that the feathery, green chamomile leaves were already covering the ground in February despite the snow that had fallen. Clearly, the writers of that advice did not consult the plant regarding its intentions.

In another portion of the garden, seeds blew away from the composted garden plot last year. They landed in the dry sandy soil outside the garden bed. Although the ground has not been amended there, the little green leaves indicate that there will be flowers there again in the summer. They don't know that they aren't supposed to be there.

Nobody told them.

Similarly, I read a newspaper report last year of a tomato plant growing brazenly on a local school ground where it received little water and less care. Its presence testified to the carelessness of a child who ate a tomato sandwich the previous year and spilled seeds on the sandy

ground. It hadn't been planted; it had been dropped. It wasn't supposed to grow there, but it grew anyway.

All this audacity in the plant world gives me hope. We can learn a lot by observing the behavior of plants. Sprouts pop up boldly when they want to and where they choose. Flowers don't know how many wars are going on. Trees are ignorant of what statisticians predict for the future of our country. Vegetables know nothing about the economy and

don't understand that many gardeners plant them because of financial concerns. Fruit has no regard for which political party is in office. Herbs don't care what the American Medical Association thinks about their effectiveness.

Plants go right on about their business of growing and blooming just as they have for centuries. All indications are that they will continue to do so. They never listen to anybody.

Only corn has ears.

THE END