The influx into Banning of people with asthma, bronchitis, sinus trouble, arthritis, and common colds continued into the spring. Cultivated sweet peas were appearing in the wake of the almond and peach blossoms, wild flowers were spreading themselves extravagantly over the whole desert, and the fields behind our motel were splashed with color. Some careless giant had trailed dirty fingers across the snowy mountain tops. A pair of plucky birds were busily building a nest in the rear of garage 16, almost directly above my washing machine. The days were so breathtakingly lovely that it was hard to believe that less than ninety miles away there were fog and cloudiness, and people with persistent coughs and sniffles. Nature's springtime orgy made us feel as though we should do a little to keep up with her. So, the first time Oliv Snyder came around, we made a deal with him. Oliv Snyder was a gardener, obviously, and--so he said--an ex journalism teacher. The latter epithet I doubted. I never heard him saying "you was" or "I seen," and David never caught him splitting an infinitive, but somehow I couldn't visualize him lecturing to an absorbed audience on the intricacies of slinging the English language around. He was a short, moody little creature with white hair which curled at the ends. He wore a cap with a frayed, mothbeaten brim, and his elbows and knees, and various other portions of his anatomy and underwear, were visible through the holes in his clothing. His theme song, patterned after that of Snow White's seven dwarves, must have been "Hiccup while you work," for on the several occasions that he worked around the grounds of the motel he devoted fully as much energy to his gusty staccato hiccups as to his gardening. Although he himself didn't seem to be much of a bargain, his proposition was. "Five rosebushes--hic!--the very finest Talisman, to be planted on out to the highway and divide your property from the motel next door. And then all in front of the motel to the highway planted in calendulas. All for--hic!--ten dollars. You just clean the--hic! weeds out and get the land ready and I'll--hic! do the rest." Two days later Grant had cleared out all the puncture vine, Russian thistles, and the other defiant weeds that never let up their efforts to regain the tiny percentage of territory they had lost to civilization. The wild flowers that bloomed with such mad splendor on the fields behind us stayed bashfully back where they couldn't be seen from the highway, and added nothing to the front view of our place. Oliv Snyder appeared at the appointed time, his car loaded with boxes of plants, rose bushes, and a box of rich mountain-dug dirt which had its particular merit, he assured us, in the fact that it was "hundreds of thousands of years old." Personally, I doubted that it was any older than any other dirt.