"Double-click and the child is yours. Double-click and the baby is aborted. But it wasn't so easy. For Yummy, perhaps, but not for Cass. It wasn't easy and it wasn't fair. She was sick of watching the the haphazard way Yummy parented her children, hauling them around, the way she talked to them and the language she used. It was so clear they were unhappy" (204). 

"Everyone knew the side dishes were typecast. The carrot was a tall redhead named rusty. The green beans were a pair of skinny twins. The cherry tomato went to a rosy second-grader with shiny cheeks. The corn was a tawny kid named Kellogg. Face it. What is a potato? A potato is a fat, round, dumpy white thing, wrapped in burlap, rolling around on a dirty stage. Somw kids never had to be a vegetable at all. Some kids got to be human beings-Pilgrams or Indians- and eat the rest of the kids for dinner."

[Page 7]

"You know what it's like here, it's not as if a whole lot happens. Good thing you're back-

Glad to oblige.

with a brood of fatherless children and a gang of dirty commie hippies."

[Page 159]

• P 144-145

"He liked the way they gathered in his room, settling around his bed, to listen to him talk about seeds and farming."

"Momoko likes them, too."

"Young people had such clear eyes. It had been long time since anyone had listened to him like that. He tried to remember his yearly speech. Seasonable cultural practices."

1. pg. 242

"And there it was: the unbearable truth, popping out of my own damn mouth. Slowely, I put it all together. "I ran away because I loved him. I ran away because he used to love me, and then somewhere along the line, when he couldn't control me anymore, he just stopped, you know?" Bewildered, I looked up at Cass. "I couldn't stand that."

2. pg. 254

"It was his soil, built up carefully with generous rotations of nitrogen fixing crops, year agter year. Recycling nutrients. Never taking out more than you gave back. So different from the way they farmed potattoes now. This soil still had life..."

3. pg. 267

"Plants have a right to life, too." 

"when she had him along, the world looked different, and she liked the way she saw things she'd never noticed before... the way she herself felt acutely visible with the baby in her arms, and the way some people's faces lit up when they saw a child" (page 130).

Cass, who's always wanted to be a mother, realizes that when she has Poo with her she's seen as one. She notices that people treat her differently, and that she can "tell a lot about people" when he's with her. In some ways, our identity (or the salience of different aspects of who we are) is affected by the people with whom we choose to be in relationship.

The Relationship Between Identity and Environment in All Over Creation

1) But they’re ours. We have to keep them safe!” She shook her head. “No. Keeping is not safe. Keeping is danger. Only safe way is letting go. Giving everything away. Freely. Freely.”

Making a choice in not making a choice, and how Yumi’s apathy is in a way a representation of most people..

2) Life of The seed

-Seed business

-Yumi is a bad seed

-Seed growing in charmey

-ending life with the seed:  ''permits its owners to create a sterile seed by cleverly programming a plant's DNA to kill its own embryos.

pg. 116

"Dame!" Momoko said. "Shoo! Shoo!" She waved her hands at the large bumblebee and plucked the naked, petal-less males from Lloyd's slow fingers. Holding the first one by the stem like a brush, she swabbed the pollen-covered anthers onto each of the glistening lobes of the female's stigma. Then while Lloyd waved his hands over her head, keeping the bee at bay, she repeated the process with the second. 

"It is better using two boy flowers for one girl," she said. "Sometimes three."

pg. 254

I. Orientation

I'd like to start again with some free writing in response to a prompt from Payne's I've Got the Light of Freedom. Here's Ella Baker (quoted on p. 93):

“My basic sense of it has always been to get people to understand that in the long run they themselves are the only protection they have against violence or injustice . . . People have to be made to understand that they cannot look for salvation anywhere but themselves.”

Write in response, drawing on events and readings (and anything else) in the past week.

II. Payne's I've Got the Light of Freedom

[Page 238]

“They were waiting for me after school and dragged me behind the maintenance shed. They stuck it in my mouth and said they were going to blow my brains out.” … “How you’re a whore,” he said. “And me and Ocean and Poo are proof of it.” …Then she asked, “what about Ocean? Does she get picked on, too?”

Phoenix shook his head. “The kids in her class pretty much all like her.”

“What about these older kids? You think she’s safe from them?”

“Yeah,” he said, then added, “She’s blond.”

“Right.”

[Page 154]

Kassie Bracken and Jessica Naudziunas, "Keeping the Poor Out of Jail,” The New York Times Video (October 25, 2015):
http://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000003995541/keeping-the-poor-out-of-jail.html