MY RAKE AND DUMB OLD HOE

My buddy Otis decided the other day he wanted us to take up gardening. Which is okay I guess. I mean we do have some dirt outback out our apartment. The landlady of this old house that she converted into apartments lets us use the backyard for whatever. We might have to share it, but the other apartment folks never seem interested. So we get the chance to do what we want with it.

Personally I would have preferred in having a one of those swimming pools. The kind you just put up with no big hassle and can paddle around when you want. Of course that would just be for the summer. During the winter I was thinking it would be a good place to store junk or some other useful idea.

But like I said my buddy got into this thought thinking having some garden would be great. I think it happen because he was watching this program on television about gardening and figured it looked like fun.

The thing is for me I always resist the urge to groan when my buddy gets into the idea of doing something different like starting a garden. That’s because I know his idea of this kind of stuff will mean he’ll talk about it and I get stuck doing all the crappy work part that involves sweating.

Now with this gardening thing, we did have some tools since from time to time we do help out with yard work like over at Granny Potts’ house. But Otis felt we needed a new rake. I didn’t see why. The old one wasn’t in that bad of shape.

What I figured we needed if anything was a new hoe. The old one had a broken handle and have of the metal blade was rusted away. And I pointed that out to Otis, but he still insisted we buy a new rake.

So he did. And then once we started trying to actually to fix up the back yard as a garden I understood why. It was because Otis was going to use the rake and I was stuck with the hoe.

Even that I could have lived with, but what really bugged me was Otis ended up using the rake for all of about five minutes to rake up some leaves and trash while this lady next door was watching. Then he put the rake down when she started talking to him and I got stuck doing everything else with the hoe.

I guess I ought to be grateful though. Because after Otis got to talking to the lady and the ended up going to the store and buying salad fixings, which I think was the whole idea in the first place, he sort of forgot about the garden.

I suppose it must be nice that Otis was able to get that lady’s attention and impress her and all since that seems to be his main reason for the gardening thing. And as long as he goes over there to eat what he and her call a salad, I’m happy. As for me, well I’ll stick to my jelly beans. At least with them I never have to worry about either new rakes or old hoes.