They built a data center on the old Hollis place, out past the second Baptist church, where the corn used to be. Forty acres of windowless beige, humming a low electric hum that the crickets have given up trying to out-sing. The sign at the gate says it is a "cloud campus," which is a strange thing to call a building with no windows that you are not allowed to enter.

I understand what it does, more or less. It holds everyone's photographs and tax returns and the half-written messages they thought better of sending. It is, in its way, the most honest building in the county: a barn full of everything we could not bring ourselves to throw away.

But I keep thinking about the corn. The corn fed the Hollis family and sometimes the rest of us, and it did it in the open, under weather, where you could watch it fail or thrive and know why. The server farm feeds something too, somewhere, but you cannot watch it, and no one here will ever eat from it. We have traded a thing that grew for a thing that merely hums. I am not against it. I am only noting the exchange rate.