When someone asked me the other day what my Labor Day plans were, I realized to my chagrin that I am planning to labor on Labor Day. Even worse, I hadn't even thought about it.

My life is out of control. At times, it feels like a freight train hurtling along, crushing any crocus or cow or cat that blunders onto the tracks, only to discover that the freight cars contain nothing but those foam peanuts (hoojies, I think, is the precise technical term) that you find in UPS boxes. The lives of most of my friends are out of control, too. It's all bustle, meeting, project, deadline, initiative, work trip, memo, conference call, download, and strategy session. To what end, every sage, including Jesus, Socrates and the Buddha, would ask?

It is not rendezvous, saunter, and muse.

An observer from Jupiter would have to ask, "What kind of caffeinated little creature is this, anyway?"

Some of my friends check their cell phone messages a dozen times per day, as if they are urgently expecting a call from St. Peter about the status of their salvation project. I have a very close friend from Louisville who, admittedly, is a librarian, who will do a PDA Web search on any subject at any time on the slightest provocation. The world indeed is at his fingertips, but the "world" in the screen of a PDA is a binary digital world, a virtual world, not the lush windy grassland that is - or was - the actual Earth.

The great American poet Walt Whitman wrote, "I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass." This summer, I haven't even had time to cut my grass, much less get close enough for a scandalous grass stain. My grass was so long the last time I mowed that I might easily have just bailed it. I have a push mower with a big engine and it just chocked and bucked its way across my lawn, even at the most glacial of paces. I thought of turning a bunch of Marmarth goats loose in my front yard, but I was afraid they'd get lost in the wilderness. Next time, a swather.

And now my 71 tomato plants are beginning to exhibit a kind of appalling fecundity. As I plunge through them, pulling a weed here and a weed there, each red-orange tomato seems to look up at me and say, in my grandmother Rhoda's voice, "So, are you going to can me or just let me rot on the vine?" I've been looking forward to canning tomatoes all spring and summer, and now that the harvest is coming, I feel I have to schedule my "tomato processing project" as if it were a trip to the dentist.

My grandmother lived for 92 years. For at least the last 80 of those years, she spent much of her summers in the garden. She canned several hundred quarts per year: rhubarb sauce, peaches, applesauce, beans, carrots, pickles, tomato juice, tomato sauce, tomato quarters, whole tomatoes, beets. The little cinderblock basement of her farmhouse looked like an illustration for the Whole Earth Catalogue. Literally hundreds of jars of produce in all the colors of the pastel palate were lined up in Mason jars on crude wooden shelves built one fall by my grandfather. I have unlimited respect for those shelves and the family farmers who built and stocked them.

And, oh, that rhubarb sauce. My mouth literally puckers as I remember the perfect sweet-and-sourness of the mash and I actually feel those rhubarb fibers dissolve before they slip down my throat. And yet, the last time I ate grandma's rhubarb sauce was at least 20 years ago.

I doubt that she ever once in her long and productive life allowed a tomato or an apple or a cherry or a raspberry to go uneaten, unprocessed, or unshared. There were no hoojies in her wheelbarrow. She was the very epitome of Jeffersonian husbandry. When the cherries were ripe, she calmly turned her attention to cherries. Nothing wasted, nothing lost. No fuss, no mess, no rush, no angst.

Food storage was for her a sacrament. She did not call attention to it, but she never chattered when she worked in her cracked linoleum kitchen. Her thumb was creased like an old wooden cutting board from the hundred thousand potatoes she had peeled in her lifetime. She wore housedresses, always. I can close my eyes and see her standing at the sink in a homemade brown and white-flecked housedress so venerable that it was nearly translucent from the washings. She wore calf-length nylons rolled down to her ankles. Even in her last years, she would not let my mother buy her an automatic washing machine because she feared it would overwhelm the drain field.

Twice a week, she got out the dented tin canister of flour and made homemade bread, using the same broken china cup as a measuring device for decades. She was not a fancy-dance quilter but a Little House quilter, saving every scrap of material from her sewing projects, and cutting out squares from worn out blue jeans and work shirts to incorporate into the next blanket.

I have her tin flour canister. I make bread a dozen times per year. Although I know the recipe by heart, I always open her handwritten cookbook and fashion the loaves by way of the perfect cursive of her recipe. In three locations in my house, I have 2-foot-high stacks of her quilts, perfectly folded. I strew mothballs among them, not because I have moths, but to remind me of Rhoda Straus' attic, a squat, hot, crouching treasury worthy of the Homeric epics, the world's largest hope chest, a Rotary convention of moth balls.

I've been multi-tasking as I write this column - planning my 2008 Labor Day. I know now that come Monday, I am going to put up my hammock for the first time this summer. I'm going to can tomatoes. I'm going to eat my evening meal drawn entirely from my garden, except for the homemade bread, one loaf of which I am going to share with a slightly ailing but very dear friend. And, because the nights are chill now, I'm going to fetch out my favorite quilt, freshen and air it in the early fall sun, and cover myself with it no later than 10 p.m.

(Clay Jenkinson is the director of the Dakota Institute. He is also the Theodore Roosevelt Scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Clay at Jeffysage@;aol.com.)