Love Is What Matters

There was something else about this property, though. Gina had thought that the air would be crystal clear this far away from the city. However, it seemed that there was always a haze in the atmosphere. “It is just hard to get away from pollution,” she thought. In fact, Mario had covered the vegetable garden with a huge glass dome and fitted it with blowers to keep the air pure. He had also extracted dirt from the earthquake site in front of their house. This dirt was well below the level of pollution in the soil, and it had many rich minerals and nutrients that gave him beautiful vegetables in their garden.

Vince’s father loved to take long walks with Vince and tell him all about the Earth. Vince would pick up a rock and ask, “Why does this rock have sparkly things in it?” Mario would tell him about different kinds of rocks and their contents. They walked by the jumbled earth at the quake site and Mario showed Vince how the slabs of rock had pushed up and how some slabs had angled down into the earth. He told Vince why this happened, too. He talked about fissures and tectonic plates and shifting earth. He said that there was a need for better instruments to look deep into the earth to see where the faults were. Then maybe some measures could be taken to stabilize the earth to prevent future quakes. Mario even talked to Vince about how the earth could be repaired from quakes and other natural and man-made disasters.