We have a lot of cottonwoods around here. They grow along the creeks or anywhere they can get at some water. Considering the ancient leaky water system that serves our town, that’s just about everywhere. But I digress. It’s cottonwood season in the valley. Female cottonwoods produce a seed surrounded by a tuft of fluff that looks like a cotton ball, and in cottonwood season the air is full of them, millions of them. They drift about on the wind hoping to land on a male cottonwood’s pollen. You can think of them as the cougars of the tree world. But again I digress. The point is that in the blink of an eye they can cease drifting about, coagulate into a single vortex of cotton balls traveling at warp speed with only one goal in mind. That blink of an eye happens when I open my garage door. That single goal: to fill my garage. At that moment, every cotton ball in Walla Walla County travels directly into it at the speed of light, there to remain in hiding from the evil ShopVac monster until, at last, they have each been captured and terminated, sometime around mid September. No doubt there is something theological about this, but I have no idea what it might be.