I catch a lot of grief for all the time I spend on Facebook. It’s probably well-deserved. When you enjoy something as much as I do Facebook, it can’t possibly be good for you, right?

But for a columnist – and someone who’s endlessly fascinated by humans and how they think – it comes in handy professionally. No, seriously. Yesterday, I found myself marveling, as I often do, at the diverse array of opinions about a diverse array of topics expressed by my diverse array of FB friends on my homepage. There’d been a theory creeping up on me for a while, and I decided to test it right there on my wall. Why Facebook? I was looking for a broad sampling of regular people. I wanted to take a poll.

Years ago, my mom gave me an Italian olive jar for Christmas. It’s like a big urn, earthen and ancient-looking  – it actually is semi-ancient, I think – and I put it in my front yard, near the azalea bushes, amidst a bunch of flower pots. The first spring, I filled the jar with dirt and planted begonias in it. They did pretty well, but they died that winter, and after a few seasons, I stopped replanting them. It was kind of a hassle – the olive jar’s wide in the middle but small at the top – and eventually, I just kind of… let it go.  (I’m always letting things go.) The jar was pretty enough on its own, I thought, and it looked nice surrounded by my potted plants.

Editor’s Note: The following essay was adapted from a shorter piece I published on my blog last month. It’s very different from the original.

"One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever. One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands and throws one's head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky slowly changing and flushing and marvelous unknown things happening until the East almost makes one cry out and one's heart stands still at the strange unchanging majesty of the rising of the sun – which has been happening every morning for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. One knows it then for a moment or so.”

Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden