Impressions at the Extremity of Civilization

Content note: this is part of a challenge of writing a blogpost per day for a week.Epistemic status: this is a series of vignettes written as-though diary entries. While substantially grounded in specific and real experiences, the writing ended up being more impressionistic and inaccurate in places; I was more interested in the writing style so I didn't take the time to fix it. Importantly the chronology and especially some of the vaguer events are not real.[Friday] Today I find myself walking with the groundskeeper, Hogan. He is an older gentleman, skin bronzed by years in the sun, fingers calloused by the carrying of stones and the digging in soil. He lives a slower life than the rest of us, the impact of his work felt over seasons rather than hours, and his conversation too carries at the slowest pace of any man or woman I have course to speak with in life. He is knowledgeable about the plants that grow throughout our plot of land, he can quickly tell me which plants will grow back and which ones are lost causes. Like many of the plants, he himself is under-maintained, and I only tend to spend time giving input on his work if something has gone wrong. But each year before the Festival Season, I walk the grounds with him and we discuss what should be tended to, what should be cut back, which walkways want to be clearer, which weeds should be removed, and I give him double his salary for two weeks to hire a helper for the increased workload. Something of a Summer cleaning.This last year a catastrophe struck, as he climbed up into one of our two Brugmansia, the one in the center of campus, to trim it. While it looks like a tree and can hold itself up with its bark, the Royal Horticultural Society describes it as a vigorous large shrub. Well, the bark did not survive his weight, and split in two, half the tree falling down on the ground dead, and the other half the worse the wear for it. It survives now in a diminished form, but I doubt it will last the year. He took