Evergreen

Can you smell it? The faint scent of evergreen―you know, the scent that fills your car when you put one of those tree-shaped deodorizers in it. (Do the still even make them anymore?). Of course, the volatile organic compounds used to release that scent are based on petroleum, not trees.

But, as you’d know if you’d ever been in the dead tree media, evergreens (once known as stories “on the hook” before health and safety removed metal hooks from media offices) are the stories you keep on hand in case of a sudden news shortage. They are timeless stories, with no news hook, that can be used to prevent white space from appearing in the publication.

If you were paying attention, you noticed that I recently ran entirely through my stack of evergreens. Then in a burst of fecundity, I wrote 21 of them.

But it is in the nature of evergreens to disappear into the publication, sometimes en masse.

You will smell evergreen for the next few weeks, should I be subjected to a much desired medical procedure whose name I won’t mention because I fear it has fallen into the same category as The Scottish Play.