Dirt Cheap

I have found a store that makes Home Depot feel wimpy. It's our local farm and ranch supply store. I spent an hour there with my son on Saturday and absorbed so much second-hand testosterone that by the time we left I felt like I could go carve a hundred-acre farm from the untamed western desert armed with little more than my bare hands and the t-bone from last night's steak.

To put it another way, Home Depot is grilled salmon--yeah, grilling is manly and all, but it's still salmon, and there's an air of domestication about it. This store is a five-pound, inch thick sirloin. Home Depot displays their bar clamps in neat pegboard rows. This place hangs them around the edge of a barrel full of yet more bar clamps, sat next to wooden crates of bolt cutters--as if to imply that you're the type of person that buys tools by the barrel and crate, so large is your spread. There are leather saddles, chemicals in bulk quantities, and warmed tubs full of chicks of breeds I've never even heard of, let alone appreciate the differences.

Why was I there? To buy dirt. Fifteen cubic feet of it. For a flower garden. Yeah, kinda makes the burly shoulders sag a little, doesn't it. I could have salvaged the situation had I had a pickup truck and had them front-loader a scoop or two of dirt in the back (they do that), but no. Fifteen bags. In the back of my minivan.

In my defense, my minivan is buff. There's very little it can't haul. I've taken home loads in that baby that no SUV short of a Suburban could handle. On the testosterone scale a truck may be beef, and a minivan grilled salmon, but SUVs are grilled eggplant. So there.

Incidentally, don't let them fool you. Dirt isn't cheap. On the other hand, it sure feels good to run your hands through it. My son had the right idea. While I was pouring the bags into the flower bed he got his toy backhoe and front loader and started moving dirt around. When I finished I stopped and joined him for awhile. There's nothing like fresh, black dirt.

I wonder what the homeowners association would say if I put up a barbed wire fence.