The guys had barely settled down on Cliff Murray’s front porch with their take-out breakfast from Mabel’s Grill when George Mackenzie noticed the stack of white plastic bags piled nearby.
    “Is that fertilizer for the lawn?” he asked Cliff.
    “No, fertilizer for Jenn’s flower gardens,” Cliff sighed.
    “Why the sigh?” asked Dave Winston as he sipped his coffee.
    “Well Jenn heard me say I was going to the Co-op and she asked me to get five bags of composted sheep manure. Me, a sheep farmer buying sheep manure! I said I could get her all the manure she wants for free but she says fresh manure stinks. I tell you, for once I was glad to wear a mask – hoping nobody would recognize me and ask why a sheep farmer was buying sheep manure!” 
    “My wife gets her way on manure,” admitted Dave. “Even I agree liquid pig manure on the gardens is a bit much.”
    “I stood up for my sheep,” Cliff said. “I told Jenn: ‘Those sheep have kept us on this farm all these years.’ She hits me where it hurts by saying: ‘No, my job with the county kept us on the farm all these years.’”
    “Ouch!” said George. “Sad, but probably true.”
    “How much do you think would be in those sacks,” Cliff wondered, pointing to the stack of manure, “about one good manure fork full per bag – at four bucks a bag? I could take a manure-spreader full of manure to town, sell it for half that price, and probably make enough to pay off the mortgage!”
    “But you couldn’t sell it because as Jenn says, it stinks,” said George. “People want what’s good in manure without the stink, so it’s got be composted.”
    “Everything has to be composted these days,” said Dave. “I was watching this breakfast news show the other morning and they had this woman on promoting ‘guilt free’ dental floss. Apparently there’s no plastic in it so you can compost it.”
    “I guess for once I’m good for the environment,” chuckled George. “I don’t floss my teeth at all.”
    “And what does your dentist have to say about that?” Cliff wondered.
    “Oh she used to nag me about it but I don’t have to listen to her any more,” George said. “She retired last month – at 54 no less. Moved up to this big summer house in Muskoka. Quite a mansion. She used to have a picture of it in her office.”
    “I wonder how much of that you paid for by not flossing?” Dave chuckled.
    “I never thought of that,” said George. “I’d guess I paid for most of the deck that overlooks the lake.”
    “So people worry about the plastic in dental floss but not the plastic bags they buy manure in,” grumbled Cliff.
    “You’re really stuck on this manure thing, aren’t you?” said Dave. “Let’s face it, people aren’t practical when it comes to gardens. Did I ever tell you about my rock?”
    “What rock?” George wondered.
    “Well I worked around this big boulder in the front field for years but finally after breaking one too many cultivator tines on it, I got a guy with a high hoe to dig it out. He was going to charge me to take it away so I just had him push it over to the fenceline.”
    “I remember that,” said George. “Whatever happened to it?”
    “Well after a couple of years this guy in a pick-up with a landscaping company logo on the side drives up the lane one day and offers to take the rock away for free. I thought that was a good deal until I heard he sold it to a city customer for $400!”
    “Ha,” laughed Cliff. “Could have been worse. Did you hear about the farmer in Belgium who was tired of working around this stone so he moved it seven feet out of the way and started an international incident? Turns out it was a 200-year-old border marker and he’d made Belgium bigger and France smaller by 1,000 square metres.”
    “Good job he didn’t sell it for somebody’s garden,” laughed George. “Imagine how that might have screwed up the border!”◊