The forty-pound bag of potting soil

A woman in the outdoor aisle picks up a forty-pound bag by the middle, decides against it, and settles on the twenty-pound bag instead, weighing the math of two trips to the car against one strained shoulder, the same calculation made at that same shelf by dozens of people a week. The bag itself is printed with more confidence than the contents deserve: a lush tomato plant on the label, roots the artist never had to render, because dirt, unlike a plant, photographs the same whether it works or not. Inside, a blend of peat or coir, aged bark fines, perlite for drainage, and a starter charge of fertilizer that lasts six to eight weeks before the soil reverts to being, functionally, potting soil and nothing else, waiting for the gardener to remember it needs feeding again. The bag is not resealable in any real sense; the plastic tears wherever the customer chooses to open it, usually the wrong end, and what does not get used that day sits folded over itself on a shelf until it either gets used the following weekend or hardens into something closer to a brick by August. Forty pounds moves through the department in a good week, sixty in a bad one, which around here means a week after rain, when everyone remembers their containers at once.

Arthur Pell