At this moment... Emily Salamanca

                      At this moment, somewhere in the universe, there is a person in China digging a hole. When I was about 5 or 6, I obsessed over anything relating to dirt and rocks and digging and geology and generally anything that could get me covered, head to toe, in sediment. I remember finding a buckeye at church on the ground and bringing it home to plant. In the backyard, I began to dig a hole. My parents thought little of it, as I had similar holes all over the backyard. But this hole was special because I put my little buckeye into in and was quite excited about having a tree that would grow. However, as I dug, my father always used to say to me 'Are you trying to dig a hole all the way to China?' which got me thinking. I'd never really thought about other places around the world and how there were people literally on the other side of the planet from me. There were people who had never considered me, a little 6 year old in Mrs. Fitzpatrick's 1st grade class, to be digging at the other side of the planet from them. Likewise, I hoped that perhaps, 6600km away from me, there was a little girl digging a hole through the Earth to plant a seed to reach me. When I dug that hole, I was planting a seed in my head that I never forgot: perspective.