Froggy Bottom Cafe – Zen Garden Edition

When we bought the house in Roswell, back in 2000, the front and back yards were barren red clay with dead bushes sticking out of it. It’s a cluster house so the front is L-shaped where the garage sticks out from the entrance and living room wall, making a little rectangle of dirt that never sees sunshine.

We hauled in top soil, laid sod for the front lawn and planted a line of holly bushes with a flower bed in front of them. That left the dark space behind the hollies and we decided to fill it with a Zen garden.

Well, you can’t have a Zen garden without some significant rocks. We hitched a flat-bed trailer to the back of Hubby’s vehicle and off we went rock shopping. After touring a number of landscaping yards, we finally found one with big enough boulders.

I’m sure the guy at the yard thought we were nuts because we had to lay our hands on them to see if they had the right vibrations, ya’know.

Now, looking at the photo at the top of this diary you’ll notice that Zen gardens have to have upright and reclining stones. The phallic uprights are male and the recliners are females. In the garden above, there appears to be a head of household, his wife, his mother or mother-in-law and a couple of female children. The rocks are a family living in the interconnected force-flows of the raked pebbles around them.

Since our children are grown and flown, we decided to get just two rocks — a Papa-san and a Mama-san. Our Papa-san is almost identical to the one above and he weighs a mere 750 pounds. Our Mama-san is a sexy rounded babe, so smooth and worn she looks like a big cushion even tho she’s hard as a brick and weighs 500 pounds.

They were individually loaded onto the trailer with a heavy-duty fork lift and I said to Hubby, “Ah, honey, how are we going to get them off of the trailer?”

“Don’t worry,” he tells me, “I’m an engineer. I’ll figure something out.”

We get home and he backs the trailer into the yard (he’s very good at driving backwards) and gets as close as possible to the line of hollies. They were only about 2′ in diameter then and there was still space between them to move the rocks thru.

He fetches a crow bar, does the lever thing, and Mama-san rolls off the back end of the trailer and keeps rolling — crushing one of the holly bushes — but actually ending up pretty close to where we wanted her. A little more crow bar/lever action and she’s in place. Hey, that wasn’t so hard! And we could get another holly for under $20.

Next, we look at Papa-san, up there closer to the front of the trailer. Hmmm. Hubby fetches a dollie, rocks Papa-san forward enough to slide the foot plate under him and then lashes him to the upright bars. Then, he thinks, he’ll tilt the dollie back on its wheels and roll Papa-san to the edge of the trailer.

This is hysterical. If Hubby were more like Ghostdancer in size and shape, it might have worked. But Hubby is 6′ tall and weighs barely 130 lbs. (Have a ever mentioned that one of his nick-names is Skeletor?) Even both of us tugging in unison with all our might can’t get the dollie to tilt back.

So Hubby calls his son to come over and help. All three of us together get Papa-san rolled to the edge of the trailer and he falls, dollie and all, into the sod, pointy-end down. Remember all that newly strewn top soil? Papa-san’s tip is two feet down deep in the soft earth. And all of us pushing with all of our might cannot budge him. He looks so ridiculous with his ass in the air that we end up falling on the grass with laughter.

After sitting like “The Thinker” for a while, Hubby decides that we must peel back the sod and dig a hole on one side so that Papa-san falls on his back. Then, we might be able to roll him over to his position and figure out a way to stand him up.

I do not witness this part of it because I am sent to fix dinner. Hard work generates hunger, ya’know. When I come out, Papa-san is on his side with the dollie still lashed to his back and there’s a huge hole in the front yard.

We eat, digest and go out into the twilight to finish the job. We discuss removing the dolly and whether Papa-san will roll. We think not. Hubby has a bright idea. He has one of those heavy-duty jacks/lifts (I forget what they’re called) that you use to get under cars. So the son and I fetch pavers, bricks, various pieces of lumber to create a platform for the jack. Hubby positions it under Papa-san’s tip and starts pumping away. The son and I shove stuff under Papa-san to keep him from falling back while Hubby adds more layers to the platform to put the jack higher and pump some more.

This process seems to take days. It becomes all we’ve ever known in life. We feel as one with the guys who built Stonehenge. Eventually — and I’m a little delirious at this point — Papa-san is upright and the wheels of the dolly are sunk in the dirt. We re-shape all of our flotsum and jetsum into a solid path, herniate ourselves getting the wheels onto the path and then it takes all three of us heaving in unison to roll that bad boy into positon. Whew!

The next day we all went to the chiropractor and it was a week before we’d recovered enough to pour out the pebbles and achieve Zen bliss raking them.