And so it begins.

Today we swing into full gardener, lawn care, landscape mode. We are planting tomatoes, spreading soil and grass seed, planting flowers, spreading fertilizer, weed killer, and hope. Hope mixed with some prayer and topped with wishes. Watered into the fresh, earth, carefully chosen, and purchased, carried home in the back of a pickup, hauled around by hand to the back of the house, cut open and spread with care to cover the bare spots. Seed sprinkled generously over the dark, rich soil. 

But, the real good news is the emergence of my true calling, “travel videographer.” I know a trip to the local warehouse style hardware store with its endless aisles, vanishing help, and dizzying variety of styles, prices and milling, moving rivers of customers wouldn’t seem to offer much fodder for a video, maybe though, if you look at it right. 

Streams of people, all with huge carts loaded with lumber, tools, plants, bags, bundles and bales, piled so high they can hardly see around them. So heavy they can hardly steer. Big, unwieldy tanks left right in the middle of the path and rush over to look at the pallet piled high with something on sale. A huge basket, heavy, imposing and impossible to get around, a rock in the middle of a stream, laws of fluid motion fueled by anger, haste, and self importance. 

You can almost hear the indignity. “That is where I was going to leave my cart, you inconsiderate slob.” And, if the pallet of sale items is significant enough there will be a row of heavy carts, running down the aisle, around the corner, and back to the door leading to the garden center. From that point it becomes a phenomenon that feeds itself.  More people see the fascination and want a small piece, without even knowing what lies at the end of the rainbow. 

It doesn’t take long for the wait to increase the pressure. By the time people get to the display they are in a feeding frenzy, convinced that anything worth that kind of line, slow, interminable had to be valuable enough to buy several, no matter what it was. Supply and demand at its most primitive. 

Fortunes are made in those moments. A mad dash, in slow motion, a wide band of shopping carts narrowing into a laser focus at one spot and exploding out from a single point, for something, anything. It is a play that repeats across stores, across cities and states, driving up the value of companies whose products have stirred the interest of a random shopper whose tastes runs toward bargains in bulk. 

I like to wander, look, touch, pick up things, examine them, wonder if the product and I could have a meaningful relationship. My wife hates it when I touch things, but she knows it is who I am, I have to touch fence posts, stop signs, it is how I practice communion with the world, it keeps me grounded. And I like to look at things in stores, find out if it would be my thing, a thing I could use. Normally it isn’t, sometimes, though. My wife goes with a plan, she has studied the advertisement, she knows what she wants, and has a path laid out in her mind. But she is willing to wander a bit, to keep me in sync with things, she is good to me that way.