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.”