An allotment of futility

There was once a woman in rural New Mexico called - rather strangely - Sisyphus.

One day Sisyphus did a trivial that really ticked off the Gods. No one remembers exactly what it was. It may have been a dumb joke about sandals.

Mighty Zeus, having no day job, took it upon himself to invent the harshest punishment imaginable. After much cogitation, the most horrendous thing the king of lightening bolts could imagine was...gardening.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. 

Zeus gave his hellish curse to Sisyphus in the form of a wheel barrow, a mountain of manure, and a patch of desert.

From sunrise to sunset, Sisyphus pushed the manure-laden wheelbarrow towards her patch of desert like some kind of crazed idiot.

In spite of her efforts, each night found the manure pile and the patch of desert magically unchanged. This left poor Sisyphus to start from scratch again the next morning.

Some evenings, due to clinical optimism and dehydration, Sisyphus claimed she was progressing. She threatened to grow Eden on her desert patch. Or at least tomatoes.

The moral of the story is this: NEVER insult the gods. They may get super-peeved and turn you into a gardener. And there is no escape from a patch of desert and a wheel barrow.