A catalog the size of a phone book popped into my mailbox the other day from some outfit called Northern Tool. I’m not sure how they got my name, except possibly I’m on everybody’s list.

It offers some 10,000 tools, many of which I never knew existed. Did you know you can buy backhoes and root rippers through the mail? How about sonic mole-chasers and do-it-yourself greenhouses?

My wife laughingly pointed out that we live in a condominium and don’t even do our own yard work, but I countered that I have always wanted a farm. So I’m going through the catalog like a kid seeing his first Sears Roebuck catalog a month before Christmas.

I’m not really sure why I am a wannabe farmer. When I was a pre-teenager, I got to spend a couple of weeks each summer on a horse farm in Maryland. Cousin Henry owned it. He had two teenage sons and seemed to welcome my visits. I can’t remember how close a cousin they were — everyone in that part of the Eastern Shore seemed related to everybody else.

Their big claim to fame was that the famed baseball player Jimmy Foxx came from there. I even got to meet him. I also got to pretend I was Roy Rogers on a saddle horse that trotted lazily around a fenced-in pasture. Occasionally, the horse could be induced into a canter, which was as fast as I cared to go. At least the horse got a little exercise, and I kept out of everyone’s hair.

Cousin Henry would mumble about me when I volunteered to help with the chores. I can still hear him: “City boys can’t pitch hay; country boys can. City boys can’t milk cows; country boys can. City boys can’t plow a straight line.”

He never stopped comparing my ineptitude with the sterling qualities of his sons. I gritted my teeth and seethed with embarrassment as I tried to conjure up things city boys could do that country boys could not. I never came up with any.

I vowed I would get revenge, that one day I would own a farm 10 times the size of Cousin Henry’s and I would have tractors instead of mules and bailers instead of pitchforks that could do all of these chores better than he could. Milking machines would do what I could not — all you had to do was hook them up.

Owning a farm became an elusive will-o’-the-wisp — kept secret lest anyone would ask me to milk a cow. The closest I came was two-and-a-half acres in suburban Connecticut where cows and chickens were forbidden. We did plant a tiny vegetable garden behind our house. But even though I knew that pole lima beans were superior to bush limas, I don’t recall that we actually grew anything. Probably because we never had the right equipment, I tell myself.

Thus, this catalog filled with things like aquatic weed rakes and pond cleaners tugged me toward my bucolic fantasy. Condos be damned.

It’s a good time to look through seed and equipment catalogs. April’s here. Buds and blooms and blossoms are bustin’ out all over — harbingers of strawberries to come with peaches not far behind, not to mention fresh corn. Can ambrosia hold a candle to such delicacies?

And you don’t need my farm — not as long as farmers markets abound. In truth, I’d make a lousy farmer. I procrastinate, which is a no-no when it’s time to plant and fertilize and spray; plus, I would name all the animals and could never harm them. Hypocritical, I know, when I dive into Sunday bacon.

Still, I can’t resist a bargain, and page 51 of my catalog is offering free shipping on a 50-horsepower tractor with loader and backhoe for the discounted price of $27,999. If only I can figure out where to store it.

Allan Jefferys, a former New York theater critic and newsman, lives in Pinehurst. Contact him at oldjeff@nc.rr.com.