M. lives down the hill from us, in an old gray Victorian house. In all M. does, he has the unswerving drive of the stock, tunnel-visioned character in a farce. He applies this drive to the maintenance and improvement of many properties in the neighborhood. Most famously, when retained to remove one side of a forked trunk from a tree that shaded my garden for many hours each day, he pressed on and cut down the two largest trees on the property. (This precipitated family blood baths and sieges of terror, but that's another story.)
This week I commissioned him to go with me to [the loathed] Home Depot to buy dirt, manure, and peat moss for the afore-discussed straw house's roof beds. We set out in his giant new Ford truck, but before we'd left the driveway, he told me he knows where to get compost cheaper.
When he came back, his truck was filled with enough compost for all the gardens at Versailles. It was black, and hot, and steam gushed from it and up into the sky. He filled the roof beds:
And then he distributed big mounds of it around the garden. I don't know why they look so small in the picture below, because they are very large.
When I felt we'd exceeded the point of overkill, I slyly told him to give the rest to my neighbor, S. He said he was actually on his way over to her house, because--inscrutably-- "she wants me to put a door in a tree." And off he went.
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