My Million-Dollar Donkey by Ginny; East Read Free Book Online Page A

sighing under my breath. More and more, I felt like I was trying to run with shoelaces knotted together while Mark was marching along, confident and inspired by our changing world. I just kept tripping along behind him, wishing he would turn around and offer an arm so I could keep up. Had he paused to notice how alone or lost I felt, he might have, but a man busy building a house doesn’t have time to pause. Besides, his arms were filled with tools and house plans, and there was no room for anything else, least of which would be my hand.

“But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal.”
    — Henry David Thoreau
THE TRANSFORMER
    A month later, I stood on the porch of our cabin holding an empty Diet Coke can, deep in contemplation.
    “What’s up?” Mark said, leaning on the rail beside me. “You look troubled.”
    The bottoms of his jeans were covered in mud, which meant he’d been crawling around inspecting the underside of the cabin again. I sighed, thinking about wasting yet another afternoon at the laundromat.
    “I don’t know what to do with this,” I said, waving the can in front of his face.
    “It might make a nice planter, or perhaps a Christmas ornament.”
    “Very funny. But really, what am I supposed to do with it?” I threw the can into a bag at the corner of the porch that was already brimming with other empty soda cans.
    Deep in the heart of rural living, they don’t provide residents with recycle bins. They don’t even provide local trash pick-up. You have to bury or haul your trash to the dump and pay for the disposal. All that lovely yard art, the rusted cars, and the stacks of broken household items that we saw stacked on, around, and under porches wasn’t there because farm folk are lazy, you see. Country people are just economizing. Without free trash removal or the convenience of having a Wal-Mart a stone’s throw away, people make do with what’s on hand. Items with any potential utility are not dumped in the country, but stored...usually where they can be seen and not forgotten, like in your front yard.
    So, given that we were not in Oz, or even Kansas, anymore, I accepted that in order to consider myself “planet-friendly,” I had to find a way to live in harmony with the land without having to rely on tax-supported county services doing most of the work.
    I located a recycling center and started saving recyclables, purposely avoiding any acknowledgment that the greenhouse gasses I’d emit driving the twenty minutes to get to the recycling center defeated the purpose. Mark explained that we were expected to dig a huge hole on our fifty acres for a burn pit and whatever I didn’t want to recycle, we would simply burn.
    “We’re going to need a tractor to dig a hole,” he announced. “How much is a tractor going to cost us?”
    “About fifty grand.”
    “Well, by all means, let’s purchase a 50 thousand dollar machine to dig a hole so we can save 15 dollars a month on trash pickup fees.”
    Mark did not look amused. “You know I’m going to need a tractor to lift the heavy logs I’m using to build the house. I also will need to bush hog the fields, dig holes for fence poles, uproot the garden when we get around to planting one, and all kinds of other tasks connected to maintaining such a large piece of property.”
    So we went tractor shopping. Our previous budget-driven life had conditioned us to buy used big-ticket items whenever possible, but in this case we had no clue about how to repair, maintain, or even drive a tractor, so we decided to purchase a spanking new one with a solid warranty and an operator’s manual. Thankfully, tractors don’t come with sunroofs, so we didn’t have to wrestle with issues of “extras,” except, of course, the slew of