We are all just one call away from being gardeners

I have two approaches when it comes to cold calls, those targeted attempts to sell me, the homeowner, a set of replacement windows or an alarm system. Usually I lie and say I have a family member in that business. Plan B: Pass the phone to my wife. Neither makes me proud.

“A man called this afternoon and said he’d like to come by and build a garden for us,” my wife told me two weeks ago.

“What? How did he know we wanted to build a garden? How did he get our name?” I asked, immediately on guard.

“He just plucked it out of the phone book,” she said. “But I trust him.”

And so last Thursday, just before 9 a.m., a red pickup with a slurry of dirt and water in the bed and a paper bag of seed packets in the passenger seat pulled into my driveway. A man with a sunburned neck and close-cropped, beginning-to-gray curls came to my door and asked if he could look at my lawn.