Planting sun flowers in spring

In the back of the yard, well, more properly beyond the yard, though one would really need to set about drawing property lines, and I know that drawing property lines is no proper way to go about drawing in an audience, he attempted to plant sunflowers. Attempted may be a generous description of a process that involved scraping up bits of dirt and glass, old rocks and detritus from where they'd paved a year and a half ago and throwing it away. The dirt that is, bagging it up and attempting to lift it into the trash can, only to discover that dirt makes the bag too bottom heavy, and winding up standing in the alley, with a pile of dirt on his shoes and an empty trash bag.

Eventually, when the neighbors weren't looking, or maybe they were looking, but they could all go to hell for all he cared judging by the state of their yards, though the did care, he cared immensely, and would probably have pretended to be picking up the dirt and putting it in the trash by the handful if anyone was watching, he swept the dirt into the alleyway, which was comprised of dirt as it was, and probably none of his neighbors would have judged him for adding dirt to a dirt pile, but one can't always be sure. After this, taking a bag of sunflower seeds, reading about how far apart they're supposed to be spread, and beginning to drop them, slowly at first, as if they were grains of sand through an hour glass, and then speeding up as it occurred to him that it could take a while to spread them evenly over the space, and finally just kind of haphazardly throwing them together, putting three seeds right on top of one another and hoping that the right one comes out on top, because they are just sun flowers in a public alley after all.

He then swept the ally clean, removing all dirt and glass, blaming the glass on the garbage men who seemed rather careless if his ears were any judge, before attempting to cover the sunflower seeds with dirt, though some of it had been removed, and sort of half-assing the job, and leaving bits of the plants that he'd removed still rooted in clods of dirt so that they will no doubt immediately grab hold again and maybe choke out the weaker of the sunflowers, and what is that plant anyway? Finally, he added a layer of good solid top soil, or at the very least soil that had been left over from the prior spring's projects, which had turned out to be more ambitious in terms of imagination than in actual work. A trait he deemed forgivable in a writer but not a library worker.

He then went and got the hose and watered them, discovering that it was too short and turning it to jet, and sort of haphazardly kicking up bits of dirt and turning it to mud as he watered that new earth, waiting for something to grow.

 And today, the fruits of his labor began to pay off, two new shoots of oily leaves poking up through a fresh mound of dirt, half-obscured by the fence under which they are trying to grow. Two new poison ivy plants. It was work well done.