Blue, Orange, and Dirty

Sarah and I don’t enjoy drawing attention to ourselves, but it doesn’t matter.  In our neighborhood, we’re famous.

In the evenings, our neighborhood often has a warm, orange glow.  This is a result of the paint color I chose for our front room.  Cars slow as they pass, mothers point, and someday I will break down and scrawl “I THOUGHT IT WAS TERRA COTTA” on the front windows.

Heeding the lesson taught by The Orange, I recently selected a sedate-yet-sophisticated gray for our exterior.  Only, the gray’s “blueish tint” ended up being somewhat less subtle than I had anticipated, so to speak, so for a day this spring our house was Wet Smurf Blue.*  (True story: A neighbor lady was driving by our so-blue-it-makes-the-sky-look-dirty house when she laid on her brakes, mouth agape, in shock.  When she noticed Sarah standing in the yard, she sniped “Nice job,” and drove off. )

Our latest claim to fame is a pile of dirt.  When I ordered some sod and sod-friendly dirt a few weeks ago, the supply folks took the square footage of my yard and consulted their charts, calculators, and bottomless expertise to determine the amount of material I would need.  They delivered the piles of brown sod and brown dirt for a mere $50 and, after a long, hot weekend of back-breaking labor, I found myself short six rolls on the brown sod, and long eight cubic whatevers on the brown dirt. 

I wasn’t worried, at first.  With all the landscaping we’re doing, I figured we could use some good dirt.  But after covering every landscape-able surface with five inches of the brown nobility, there remains a grizzly-sized heap in the street. 

Our neighbors, naturally, are stressed.  Given our track record, they’re probably worried that the big brown pile is a new “feature.”  As in, The Orange Room People’s Sandbox Gone Horribly Wrong.  But it’s not.  It’s not a feature. 

It’s just a pile of dirt that is never, ever going away.

* The oft-uttered exclamation “What the smurf?!” will never be more appropriate than that day, so I’ve pretty much stopped using it.