You Can Do It, We Can Help

After grading 200 final exams and submitting two sizeable grants this week, I rewarded myself in kind. Like any other good suburbanite, I took a trip to Home Depot with my man. We were determined to buy the equipment necessary to catch up on roughly three years worth of landscaping in a weekend.

Our house needs work. Let it be said that most of our contemporaries live in castles by comparison. It’s been a deliberate choice to live simply so we can travel often and focus on what Andjie calls “the love”.

But in a not so insidious way Home Depot does something to dissect your plan of simplicity. That Big Orange Box draws you in like a churro stand in smoldering Tijuana, showing you exactly what you knew you never needed.

The Orange Box succeeds in making you feel like every sagging inch of your house needs a facelift. You come in for a quick trim, and realize you need a color. While stacking an overpriced edging brick onto our trolley (come on, it’s molded cement), I overhead a young girl grumble to her partner:

I want mulch, but I want pretty mulch.

I glanced at Casey. We smiled the infamous “what the hell are we doing in the suburbs” look of disdain and then ambled over to the pesticides and poisons department. When in Rome...

New Zealand had trained us to be thrifty and resourceful, taking what we could get and reusing everything we had. We’ve tried to transpose this ideology to the American suburbs, but it’s like swimming up the proverbial stream.

We ultimately scavenged several cubic yards of bark chips from the city’s recycle station, but I fell asleep thinking of prettier mulch and a prettier house. Somebody save me from myself.