Home incompetence

The older I get the more I’m humbled by people who turn their yards into masterpieces.

Who am I kidding? I’m not humbled; I’m disgusted. Where do they find the time? The energy? The money!

Cozy patios. Serene decks. Tidy vegetable gardens laden with juicy tomatoes. Lush lawns manicured, mown and trimmed to perfection.

Makes me sick.

My wife and I are proud owners of an immature suburban backyard. In two short years I’ve managed to cultivate an arid wasteland right here in South Louisiana, an ecological anomaly worthy of LSU post-graduate study.

I try to improve it, but my plans are either flawed, ignored or never get off the ground.

I’ll arrive at a big home improvement center at 7 a.m. on a Saturday to gather supplies for a project. I feel good—I’m beating the heat, and I’m surrounded only by the dedicated and the aged.

But two hours later I’m still roaming the aisles in a stupor, distracted by every gizmo, gadget and tool I’ll never need or use. “Home,” my cell phone screen reads, so I answer. “Are you ever coming home?” my wife asks.

I notice I’ve amassed $783 of stuff in the basket, so I start stashing it on random shelves as I make my way to check out, hoping to avoid eye contact with someone who sees me stick a $249 drill amongst the closet organizers.

Once home, my plans quickly devolve into confusion, then outright failure.

I had the audacity to try a drainage project the likes of which the Tennessee Valley Water Authority would have outsourced. It involved modifying a pair of giant planters, several lengths of PVC pipe, some bricks and, of course, duct tape. Long story short: Those items cluttered the flowerbed, the front yard and the garage longer than Gov. Blanco’s term of office.

My worst yard failures, though, involve killing things.

I tried to grow tomatoes and was instantly stupefied by my choices: Big Boy, Bigger Boy, Enormous Boy, Steroid Boy, Bionic Boy and my favorite, Boy You Are Naďve If You Think You’re Gonna Grow Tomatoes, Boy. My tomatoes started late, grew slowly and died ugly.

But lately I’ve turned my energies to the garage, which I’ve stuffed with purchases from large home improvement centers. And therein lies my little problem—or as Seinfeld’s Kramer would blurt, “Oh you’ve got a big problem!”

Plastic storage containers. I don’t know why, but I gather them like a senile octogenarian might hoard bottle caps.

And my usually gentle wife is losing her patience. “This is some sort of sickness,” she recently suggested. “Every time I open a door everything inside’s in a plastic box.”

It’s obviously my futile attempt to manage chaos, to compartmentalize it, to clarify it. I just don’t know how much more my wife can take before she snaps and does something drastic.

Come to think of it, if I go missing, tell the police to start by searching through my plastic containers for any particularly heavy ones.