Junkyard Garden

Sunday mornings before church is a heck of a time for Mel and me. By the time we get around to headin' out the door, they ain't much holy thoughts rumblin' around in our old Ford. But this morning there was a saving grace.

I was standing at the kitchen sink doing the breakfast dishes when I looked out the little window above the sink and saw my neighbor, Vi, out in the yard with her hands in her pockets looking at the ground. I dried my hands and opened up the back door and shouted, "Whadya lose, Vi?". Well! The string of obscenities that followed left my ears burning and my need for church just a little more pronounced.

I hurried over to the fence line. "I declare, Vi, if your kids heard you they'd think you was the devil incarnate. What is going on?"

What followed was the funniest story I ever heard and to listen to it with a straight face about beat all I'd ever seen.

Her husband, Danny, is the biggest junk collector in the county. Mel and I mutter under our breaths every time we drive by their place. It's just a wreck. He's got old cars parked out front of Vi's tidy little house and old empty oil drums littering the yard. He's got big wooden spools and huge rusty fenders and car parts all over the place. He saves them up for his "projects" as he tells Vi. She's a good little southern wife and just purses her lips and says nothing, but Lordamercy, the spirit must a took hold of her this week while he was on his annual fishing trip because when he came home all hell broke loose.

She musta got plumb sick and tired of looking out her pretty floral curtains at that pile of something outside because she called in an old boy that works down at the service station on Elm. He drives around an old rusty tow truck and does light work on the side. Well Vi hired that boy and had him drag every one of them old pieces of crap to the center of her yard. Me and Mel saw it when we came back from Vespers other night and just thought Danny was conglomerating and taking inventory of what he had. By Friday morning, when the boys got on the school bus, Vi had planted a beautiful garden with mulch and some nice bushes and buckets of flowering spruce and nice winter plants in tubs all around the old cars and trucks and she even had a big dormant cherry tree planted right in the hood of an old 1957 Chevy truck that had no hood. That tree just stuck right out of that truck's hood.

From what Vi said when Danny got home he was fit to be tied! When he asked her what in the *%$#@! had come over her she just said "Well, Danny, the Lord spoke to me and told me when I received lemons to make lemonade." and Danny told her that she was spending way to much time listening to the Lord and not near enough time listening to him so he took her car keys and buried them in the backyard. That was what Vi was doing that morning. Hunting for her car keys.

Well, I offered my sympathies and then headed back to the house to get the kids ready. Then in the car when all the kids were squirming and Mel's face started turning red, I told him the story. Let's just say that when we pulled into the parking lot, we were all feeling the spirit this Sunday morning.