Our story so far: Over the phone late one afternoon, my husband told me he was excited about a “big score,” and he summoned me forthwith to the church we were renovating into our home. 

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As I exited my truck, I heard the foreman telling Tyler he had two more loads. Did he want them?

“Yes! I’ll take all the dirt you’ve got!” Tyler told him.

The semi truck and the foreman left the scene, and Tyler, sipping a beer, regaled me with the story of his score.

That morning, Tyler was knee-deep (quite literally) in his garage foundation construction project. He noticed an enormous backhoe digging a hole in the here-to-fore green yard of the elementary school. Huh, it had looked like the construction workers over there were wrapping things up, and now they were turning new soil.

Naturally, Tyler didn’t let curiosity gnaw at him. He walked over to find out what was going on. He was told they were building a turn-around for trucks that delivered lunch to the school.

“What are you doing with all that black dirt?” Tyler asked. It was rich, beautiful black dirt (if dirt can be beautiful—apparently, the blacker the dirt, the more organic matter and nutrients are in it).

“Haul it away, I guess,” the foreman told him.

Tyler offered to let them haul it one block. Straight to the church. His offer was one the foreman couldn’t refuse. Rather than pay a driver to haul it an hour away, he could niftily get rid of it only a block away.

“We’d pay $600 a load for black soil of that quality,” Tyler told me when I expressed disappointment that his score turned out to be … dirt. Only a gardener could appreciate the value of dirt; I was not a gardener.

Well, we were the proud new owners of four semi-loads of black dirt, enough for a king-sized berm.

“The timing is perfect,” he continued. “I’ve got a grader right now to move it around.”

Indeed, he did. His cousin had lent his to us for our garage project.

Lucky us.

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Today’s headline is a quote from the Dalai Lama.

Tomorrow: Chapter 26 tells the story of ancient technology. Read about it here.