We did some work in the yard last week between cold spell #1 and cold spell #2 while it was sunny and warm outside. My brother bundled brush. I ran to the hardware store for lumber for another square-foot garden. Trudy prepared the soil, mixing vermiculite into the loamy garden blend sitting in bags in the back.
Building a square-foot garden bed is not exactly rocket science. You cut the lumber. You drill the holes. You drive in the screws in the four corners.
But you see, such insight doesn’t come easy to a man with the kind of hands that used to make my grandmother coo, “Oh Davy, you have such soft hands.” The perils of sitting at a keyboard all day.
So anyway … there we are, Trudy and I, on our knees on the patio, she holding the wood, me drilling and screwing — changing the bit for a small hole to a larger countersunk hole and finally for a socket to drive in the screw. While she was dutifully holding the corner square, I was drilling and changing and drilling and changing and screwing and changing in orderly synchrony.
At one point, Trudy pointed to one of the holes I had just drilled.
“You know, you could just drill all the little holes first so you don’t have to change the bit so often.”
Oh sure. And then what would happen? We’d be done in 10 minutes instead of working on this spirit-lifting project for more than an hour.
Right.
Next time.