When I was eight years old or so, we lived in a great ranch-style house just outside of a small college town in western Oklahoma. It looked like this:

You can’t tell from this photograph, but that house had a wooden roof. In the spring of 1989 (I believe), our little section of the prairies was rocked by a particularly nasty hail storm, and those wooden shingles were torn all the way to hell and back. So my dad decided he was going to replace the roof himself, with the help of a friend who was a roofer. Now of course, before you can put down a new shingle, you have to rip off the old one and toss it in the yard. That’s why, in the summer of 1989, my brother and I – seven and nine years old – spent all day with a box – you know like those boxes that copier paper comes in? One of those. We had a copier paper box and we traipsed all over the yard picking up shingles. And I’ll never forget, my dad was like, “If you don’t want to do this for a living you whole life, you should really go to college.”

Just a side note here, I FULLY plan on doing this to any children I may or may not have. Or, if you want me to, I’ll do it to yours. I’LL PUT ‘EM TO WORK.

Also, I should also mention that this was the summer that the Batman movie came out, the one with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson, so my brother and I, we were in a real sort of Batman place. Every afternoon we got a break from picking up shingles to spend an hour watching reruns of the Batman TV show from the 1960s. I think we’ve seen every single episode.

Okay, so. I’ve done a great deal of physical labor since that summer. I’ve worked as a stock boy at Wal-Mart, I’ve had crap jobs, and then I became a homeowner and started a garden. But I have NEVER. EVER. EVER done as much back-breaking labor as I did this past Saturday. Straight-up back-breaking.

Here’s how it got started. See, two years ago, when I started my backyard vegetable garden, I put down a dinky little wooden border. It was a pain in the ass to put down, it was expensive, and I hated it.

See it, down there at the bottom? This stupid, dinky little fence. So last year, when I decided to double the size of my plot after the runaway success of 2008, I thought, “There’s no way that dinky little fence did anything. It didn’t keep grass out at all because I mean, it was buried a half-inch deep. There’s no way it had any effect, and it was expensive and a pain in the ass to put down” and on and on. So, last year, I doubled the size of my plot and decided I just wouldn’t line the bed with anything. And OH MY GOD, YOU GUYS! The dinky little pain-in-the-ass wooden fence buried a half-inch deep? IT TOTALLY HELPED. Because in 2009, HERE CAME THE GRASS.

It was so ugly, I don’t even have a photograph of it. All I know is, on June 28th of last year, our garden was beautiful enough that we had a nice little concert back there, our friends K.C. and David played their music for our neighbors, and everyone had a grand old time. A few days later we left for our whirlwind trip to Washington, D.C. and Ireland. We put the sprinklers on a timer, and when we came back, the flower beds, the garden, ALL OF IT was totally overrun with grass. It killed my squash crop, it severely limited our crops of everything else, and it made the whole garden a sort of a disaster. I have this photo of the plot on August 2, 2009, but it doesn’t really do it justice:

Anyway, the whole endeavor was kind of a huge bust last year. It wasn’t just because of the grass, but it didn’t help. Actually, if you look at the far right of that photo, you can sort of see how badly the grass – IN TEN DAYS WE WERE GONE – totally overran the flower beds. ENTIRELY.

So as things started to get warmer this year I started thinking. I started SCHEMING. HOW AM I GOING TO WIN AGAINST THE GRASS THIS YEAR? What, I asked myself, is totally impenetrable? What could I put on the edges of my plot that’s thick and heavy and hard and will say FUCK YOU, GRASS, YOU AIN’T COMING IN HERE! Then it came to me:

Cinder blocks.

CINDER BLOCKS! I can line the whole bed with them, and then, in the holes, I can plant flowers and herbs and peppers! OH MY GOD THIS IS THE BEST IDEA ANYONE HAS EVER HAD! IN THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF IDEAS! YAY FOR ME!

So. On Saturday Brian and I got up and went to IHOP, because – look, we might be the first people in their 30s to ever be invited to join the AARP. Because we are OLD. We don’t know what the kids are listening to nowadays and we don’t care and when did the young people stop having respect for their elders and in my day yadda yadda yadda WE ARE OLD WE WENT TO IHOP. Anyway, then we went over to Lowe’s, where I had planned to buy two dozen cinder blocks.

And here’s something: cinder blocks are – uh – heavy. I KNOW! SO! We got 26 of them – because you never know – loaded them off the shelf and onto that giant-thing mover they have at home improvements stores, dragged that all over creation while we got some spray paint. Because I wasn’t going to have some ugly gray blocks lining MY garden, OH NO. I was going to spray paint those mothers – you know, so they’d look nice. ANYWAY. So we paid – cinder blocks ain’t the cheapest things ever, let me tell you – and loaded those 26 blocks from the giant-thing mover into the back of my truck. Drove it home, UNLOADED those 26 blocks from the back of my truck into the back yard.

THEN the Prison Labor began. Because the bed had been so overrun with grass, in order to bury these cinder blocks halfway down (about 4 inches), I had to dig a hole about a foot deep, dig out all the twisted and tough grass roots, fill it back up, even it out, AND THEN go over and spray paint the block. I chose a nice shade of blue. THEN, once the block was painted, I had to haul it back over and set it in the hole so it would line up with the one before it. I started on the side that was most overrun with grass – I actually lost about a foot off that side of my garden because it was so badly overrun it was just easier to come in a little. By the time I was done with that side I was more exhausted than I’ve ever been. But I thought, no, just do one more. So I did one more. I started the next side. And then one more.

I kept doing one more and one more and one more.

I took this photo when I stood up, declared myself done, and went inside:

I got to this point and said, “I AM FINISHED.” I went inside, washed off my hands, and started on some other project. When that was finished – planting some of last year’s seeds in peat pellets – it was bugging me that I wasn’t finished with this yet. And so I went back out, picked up the shovel and a block and my can of spray-paint, and I FINISHED THAT MOTHERFUCKER.

I went out there thinking, “Oh hell, while Brian’s in the shower” - meanwhile, while I’ve been doing this, he’s been GOING TO TOWN on our big flower bed, digging up crap that we’ve hated since the moment we bought the house five years ago, getting rid of all the grass that was in there, and together we’ve filled up both our trash bins with yard clippings – anyway, I’m thinking that while Brian’s in the shower I’ll just put down one more block. And one more. And one more. And then it was DONE, MOTHERFUCKERS! DONE! FINITE! AY AY AY! I thought I might start howling at the moon like a dog. Except I was so tired. I know it’s not a long walk, but I honest to God do not remember walking back in the house. EX. HAUSTED. FORMERLY. HAUSTED. I dunno, whatever that word means.

I finished at about 6 p.m. Between the digging, the hauling, and the spray painting, my hands were a MESS.

Just dirt and blue paint EVERYWHERE. There are still flecks of blue paint all over my ankles. I’ve used half a container of Lava soap and it still won’t come out. But I showered, vegged on the couch for an hour or so, got dressed, and we enjoyed a very lovely evening watching my friends Clint and Buck, who perform as part of OKC Improv and The Ones Your Mother Warned You About, at the Gaslight Theater Company.

It was almost a perfect day. And now, though I still need to till up this whole plot. it’s a lot more ready to be planted than it was before. Grass is getting tackled. Some plants are going in this weekend; my transplants from SeedSavers won’t appear until closer to the end of the month. Anyway, so here’s this year’s map.

I’m abandoning squash. I love squash, but it’s a BUG MAGNET. And as I’m trying to be all organic, I don’t want to spray. And cucumbers went gangbusters in this plot in 2008. And they were delicious; I found a breed of white cucumbers at Seedsavers this year, and I’m doing those alongside your standard green ones. I’ve got four kinds of tomato transplants coming, and some okra seeds. I can’t wait to see how this cinder block experiment works out. BECAUSE IT HAD FREAKING BETTER. I wasn’t very excited about the garden this year; I’m getting started over a month later than usual. But now that this is all finished I can’t wait to get started.