From yard sale to rain forest

Mrs. Cool Kid enjoys going to yard sales and thrift stores. She’s very thrifty. And more yardy than you’d believe.

She will, on occasion, buy me something that I will, on all occasions, heave trashward as soon as her back is turned.

Unless it’s a book.

She bought me one recently. It was “101 Ways to Bug Your Friends and Enemies.”

“The title reminds me of you,” she said.

Stardust and daffodils remind me of her. Oh, well.

The truth is that I don’t actually like bugging my friends and enemies. I just find it necessary.

You do what you must do — unless it involves these five words in any order: summer, during, grass, the, cutting.

None of that mattered anyway, because when I flipped through the book, it turned out not to be an instruction manual. It was a novel. That was fine, but before reading it, I wanted to know more about it.

I decided to look up reviews on the Amazon.

So I sold my stump collection — after cutting down some trees in the backyard — and bought a plane ticket to Ecuador.

I had a hard time. The propellers of my search engine kept getting clogged with river weeds and piranha teeth.

I tarried on, but could find no mention of the book along the winding banks.

It wasn’t a complete waste of time, though.

There amid the exotic flora and microbiota, I discovered a cure for one of mankind’s most terrible afflictions — people sticking their nose in my business.

It was shaped like a rock. It was as hard as a rock. It was a rock.

I’ll see you next year at the Nobel Prize for Medicine convention. Wear your fez.

I also discovered a lost civilization. They were looking for an Ole Times Country Buffet.

Finally, I figured it’d just be easier to look up the reviews online. So I cut down part of the rain forest and traded my newest stump collection for a ticket home.

Turns out “101 Ways to Bug Your Friends and Enemies” is a YA novel about a middle school romance.

I heaved it trashward.

And I gently cradled — oh, so softly and so very gently cradled — my rock.

And waited.

This story was originally published May 21, 2016 at 9:09 PM with the headline "From yard sale to rain forest."