The Rock Garden

 

Dirt.

What’s more common than dirt?

Air and poor taste maybe, but that’s about it.

As with everything, there’s good dirt and bad dirt.

Good dirt is river bottom topsoil and supermarket tabloids.

Bad dirt is our yard.

The only thing that keeps our yard from being a gigantic slab of limestone is a thin membrane of crabgrass.

I’ve become so envious of other yards that, when I visit friends, I always steal some of their dirt.

Our yard is so rocky I’ve seen emaciated night crawlers slumped against scrawny weeds with signs that read, “Will catch fish for dirt.”

Nevertheless, each year, the lovely Mrs. Borengasser sends for something to be planted – mail order bulbs or seeds.

But then one year, she orders a garden.  AN ENTIRE GARDEN.

A garden isn’t like most mail order items.  With a garden, it isn’t some assembly required.  It’s all assembly required.

For a garden, assembly usually means digging.  Not in our yard.  Here, assembly means a pickax and blasting caps.

To be able to plant a garden, I need twenty or thirty bags of topsoil.  This is difficult.  I always find it humiliating to walk into a lawn and garden store and purchase dirt, as if I didn’t have enough sense to find some. 

Each time, I expect the clerk to say, “Excuse me, sir, but there’s actually plenty of dirt out there that’s free.  Did you know that the ground is dirt?”

Back home, surrounded by my tools, gloves, topsoil and mail order garden kit, I begin.

Gardening like this isn’t relaxing.  It’s work.  The only time I’ve ever seen anyone work this hard was in old black and white penitentiary movies.  Or Cool Hand Luke.

You won’t see contemporary convicts working like this.  If you tell a group of today’s convicted serial killers that they’re going to have to plant a garden in my yard, they’ll go nuts.  Ballistic.  They’ll riot.  They may take hostages.  At the very least, they’ll produce defective license plates.

After several hours of work, I’m exhausted.  I have so many blisters, I look as if I’ve come down with a bad bout of leprosy.  I prop myself up against a tree and insert an IV needle into my arm that’s connected to a keg of Gatorade.

But I have to finish.  To keep me going, I start singing a medley of chain gang songs.  I imagine I’m Cool Hand Borengasser, condemned to ten years of hard labor for busting up some parking meters one night with a ball bat.

Suddenly, without thinking, I yell in a voice that would make Paul Newman proud, “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”

The lovely Mrs. Borengasser comes to the door and asks, “What did you say”

“Nothing, dear.  By the way, I’ve got an extra tulip bulb.  Where do you want me to plant it?”

“Anywhere,” she replies.  “Take your pick.”

“Oh, I’ll take my pick all right,” I assure her.  “And my jackhammer, too.”