It’s raining on our tarp garden.  It’s very soothing, the sound of the rain bouncing off of that brown tarp, but it’s also reminded me that the tarp garden exists – something which I had forgotten.

Three years ago we ripped the vinyl siding off of our house, repaired and replaced the clapboards underneath, and painted the clapboards a cheery yellow.  The house looks great – huge improvement – but we never figured out what to do with the old vinyl siding, so we stacked it in a pile just behind the house and covered it with a brown tarp.  We weighed the tarp down with large brown plastic plant pots filled with dirt and kind of forgot about it.  Last time my brother visited he commented on the lovely field grass and clover we grow in those pots, and sometimes I hear the rain on the tarp, but otherwise it’s become part of the scenery.

And it will probably stay part of the scenery.  Jim tried once to recycle some of the siding at the local transfer station, but the transfer station booth attendant yelled at him that it wasn’t recyclable.  “So what can I do with it?” Jim asked him.  “Have the guy who did your siding get rid of it,” said the attendant.  “I’m the guy,” said Jim, which earned him some respect but no disposal options other than the suggestion to cut the siding into small pieces and put it in trash bags.  Which Jim tried, but soon discovered that cutting siding into pieces chews up your hands and takes forever.

Maybe someday we’ll get a dumpster and put the siding in there, along with some other home project detritus (the crappy cardboard bathroom and bedroom doors that are moldering in the shed come to mind), but dumpsters are so darn expensive these days – at least $500, more if you go overweight.  And first we need to do a few things like replace the leaky hot water heater and fix the crumbling bathroom floor.  After a year or so without major home projects, things are starting to catch up with us again.

Meanwhile, though, I’ll daydream a little today about how our yard would look with the line of hostas extended through the area where the tarp garden currently sits.  Someday, right?