M: 4/29/03

Work Diary, 4/29/03

This weekend I steeled myself with several cups of coffee and went
outside to work on the garden. I found my special tool called "The
Claw" and started on the square beds we had put in last summer. There
are nine of these beds, nine perfectly square fresh hells to till and
sift and rip the flesh off pasty white hands. I finished tilling all of
them, found a particularly nasty blister on my left thumb, and promptly
went inside and called a landscaper. Her name is Tess, and for
three-thousand dollars she is going to transform the Sahara that is our
yard into a xeriscapic oasis.

There will be rock gardens, sandstone paths, and ground cover; bushes,
deciduous non-bearing fruit trees, and pea gravel; iris, bulbs, and
blue-gray Russian dwarf something-or-another. The bindweed will be
pulled, the ground roto-tilled, fabric laid down to abate the
persistent crabapple suckers. Plants that hate the shade will abound,
since there is so little shade, and primordial microcosms will set up
camp around the heat-giving flagstones.

Yucca and its sharp, spiny, trash-catching leaves will not be part of
the plan, or so says my partner. Personally, I like them. They'd keep
small children from wandering into the yard.

On the smoking dock at work, during those tedious conversations
strangers start up with one another, I've mentioned the ongoing project
of my front yard. Often my fellow smokers' eyes glaze over while they
happily relate working in their childhood yards, allowed to wield the
water hose and open the seed packets, all of it leading up to the day
when they were given their own rose bushes to tend. Some of them had
miniature garden tools in pastel blues and yellows.

Most of what I remember from being in my childhood yard is the
horrible, sneaking suspicion that I was an unwitting participant in an
allergy pill commercial. During the summer months, I would lie
motionless on the living room couch, impervious to the tufts of
cottonwood and the insidious, invisible ragweed - but at a cost.
Over-the-counter antihistamines kept me in that vague place between
wakefulness and sleep. I couldn't concentrate enough to read, and there
was always tomorrow, and tomorrow, to meet up with friends.

Fortunately, the drugs are better these days. I can pop a pill that
lasts twenty-four hours and get on with things. And as for those who
carry fond memories of their familial gardening, I'll give them the
benefit of the doubt and try to believe them. Even if, during those
hot, vapid afternoons of my childhood, I can clearly remember more than
one kid screaming, "I hate weeding the zucchini! You mow the lawn! I
don't want to pick the tomatoes! I hate tomatoes! I hate you!"

My feelings exactly.