Long ago, when these mirror-like office lighting grids were born in a Chinese factory, they sighed and said, Well, we’re off for a boring existence. We’ll hang for thirty years with fluorescent lights above us and underpaid employees below, reflecting lights cheerfully, swinging down every year or so to have our bulbs replaced, gathering dust, barely noticed by the people whose corporate life we illuminate. Companies will be bought and sold underneath us, cubicles will be rearranged, people will be hired and harangued and fired, and nothing will change for us. Then one day the wrecking ball will descend and we’ll be smashed into pieces, along with everything else, to make way for a new parking lot.

My, how the future changes.

For whatever reason, these ten lighting grids did not end up in an office park in Poughkeepsie, but in the free pile at our local dump. Jessica picked them up and hauled them home, still wrapped in their shipping plastic. She thought they’d be perfect for greenhouse shelves and indeed they will be; since a grid allows spilled water, dirt, and organics to fall straight through to the ground. The poor grids huddled together under a tree all winter, awaiting their destiny, thinking, This doesn’t look like a cubicle farm. It looks like a real farm, with chickens and ducks and dogs and fruit trees and a garden and gung-ho kids.

Then along came a man in blue coveralls, hauling 2x4s and grumbling because he’d left his hammer up at the house, and then his speed square, and then his tape measure, and then his level. When things got all squared away, the grids were the only things that were square; because their destined greenhouse looks like it was built by Robinson Crusoe with nary a square angle in it. The man pounded together a rickety-looking frame, came and got the trembling grids, and dropped them in between the wood frames, three on the bottom shelf, three on the top, blip blip blip. (The other four grids are for frames on the opposite side of the greenhouse.) And hey, they sort of fit!

Now that’s not a bad destiny for a bunch of forlorn lighting grids. They’ll get used. They’ll support pots and trays for years and years, they’ll have dirt and weeds and roots dropped all over them, they’ll get water stained, and sure as shootin’, a kid or two will climb up on the shelves and break through one of them.

But they’ll be happy. Man shall not live in office cubicles alone.