It's nearly an impossibility to find anyone as fruitcakey as myself, especially in a tiny town like mine, but when I became friends with Arlene I knew I had beaten the odds.

        I should have recognized the first warning signs as soon as we decided to build a greenhouse. Although we did have the advantage of knowing a hammer from a screw driver and which end of a nail to point where when we pounded it into a board, we had no idea what to do with a level or a plane, but figuring that these were minor problems we went to work.

        At this time Arlene was living on a farm just outside of town, complete with a huge barn with an 8 by 10 entryway on the front, standing about 8 feet high. Her landlord was kind (?) enough to let us have it in return for tearing it down. Not a problem. However, we spent the first day clinging frantically to the side of the barn, certain in our minds that we were going to topple onto the barnyard.

        Gradually we got used to the idea that our lives were probably in danger and in about 5 days time were scrambling up and down the ladder and tearing off that entry like we knew exactly what we were doing. After about 2 weeks of a mixture of tearing down and plain terror, we finally had that darn entry down.

        Next problem was hauling it to my backyard, site of this beautiful greenhouse. Arlene had a beat up old truck with almost no brakes which we decided would have to do, even though most of the road was downhill. We loaded the lumber into the back, Arlene driving and pumping the brakes as fast as she could, while I sat in the back holding down the 2 by 4's.

        By working frantically we got the frame up within days. always with the help of a "smidgeon". Luckily the house next door had a new roof and the shingles that were torn off were laying around my yard, most times under a bush, which we had to snake under to retrieve them. When Arlene's hubby asked if the greenhouse was square, she replied that, "no, it's not square, it's 12 by 18".

        We didn't have many clues about how to join the plastic cover, but did find a fool-proof method. While Arlene cut and held together 2 pieces of plastic onto a 2 by 4, I heated up my iron to moderately warm and raced out the back door to slap it on the joint. This worked well unless the iron was too hot, in which case I carried the iron back into the house with a coating of melted plastic on the bottom which I then had to scrape off with a spatula.

        Our worst experience came when we had placed 2 long ladders at each end of the greenhouse, rolled up the roof plastic and waltzed up our ladder intending to lay it out onto the roof. Imagine our surprise when we discovered that although we were on the inside, that silly plastic had to be put on the OUTSIDE.

        In time it was finished and we went to work planting our seeds. Eventually the reluctant seedlings came up and thus posed another problem. The little gas heater we had counted on to keep everything warm did not do it's job, and so every night I would have to drag in flat after flat after flat and put them to bed on kitchen table, freezer, dryer, washing machine, and every morning would have to reverse the process.

        Nothing grew like it was supposed to and we wound up going to another greenhouse, ( a good one ) and buying almost all our plants. This one was located about 30 miles away from us and we took turns shopping there.

        Needless to say, we only operated that cussed thing for one season and then tore it down, never having made our fortune like we had counted on.