OLDER THAN DIRT

With spring fever raging through my veins and Mother Nature cooperating in the weather department I moved beyond just staring out my dirty windows wishing away the last of the snow banks and decided that the time was finally right to hang laundry out on the line.  There is nothing that smells better than sheets and pillow cases that smell like fresh air.

That's how it all started.  Bright and early one morning I took my basket of washing to hang out on the line and then took to meandering around the yard because the sunshine was warm, and who wanted to vacuum anyway?

My next favourite thing to do in the spring is to go and poke around in my flower beds to see if anything is coming up yet.  Besides quack grass, that is; quack grass is always coming up.

I had an hour or so to play in the dirt so I grabbed a digging fork and started turning over soil and weeding out the unwanteds.  One such unwanted was the plastic border that was supposed to be keeping the grass out and had proved itself useless at the job for years.  Sometime before the snow fell last fall I had begun ripping it out and now it lay across the lawn asking me "So now what are you going to do?"  It was either re-install it, or grab it and keep pulling.  Full of vim and vigor I chose the latter.

Time flew by.  Demolition can be so fulfilling.  You go into it knowing that you're going to end up with a big mess, but that it will all lead to something new.  You don't let yourself think about the work involved: it's just better that way.

I worked my way around the circumference of the garden and eventually came to a small pile of rocks left there last summer by some (unnamed) crazy lady who thought the answer to this garden border quandary was to dig a trench all the way around, lay geo-teck along it so as to confuse the quack grass with something new, and then fit about 1000 multi shaped rocks into it like a gigantic puzzle she would make up as she went along.

"Easy peasey" you say?  Of course you would say that - you're not the crazy lady who did all the work.

The first day, while my sheets dried on the line, the work was mostly digging - done while in a standing position and using the standard muscles a person tends to use on a regular basis.  It ended off with placing the few rocks already there - just enough to show the potential for how this was absolutely the right thing to be doing.  It was approximately 10 feet out of 140, but I was energized with a taste of success.  And I slept well in those fresh aired sheets.

Day two dawned cool and cloudy but I had momentum on my side.  Not only that, but there was a whole rock pile behind the trees - suitable material at my favourite price from a time when my Farmer was going through his rock splitting phase.  It was a mere 100 meter trek, round trip.  Wheel barrow full by wheel barrow full I picked, loaded, transported and dumped rocks at my project site.  I got another 14 feet done that day and I slept really well that night too.  It was getting out of bed the next morning that was challenging.

The days went on and the stones got scarce so I moved on to another rock pile even further away.  Braving ticks and burrs and smashed fingernails I would climb the pile and sort through it.  My building blocks had to be flat on one side, about four inches thick, the bigger the better up to the point where I couldn't move them anymore.  Also, I was looking for unique colours and textures; if I was going to do this I was going to make it interesting.

By day four my body was getting down right balky about moving.  But I was more than halfway - there was no quitting now.  My trips to the rock pile did slow up a bit and I found myself sitting down more often, and getting all philosophical about my place in the space/time continuum.  At one point I found a particularly superb rock and began to marvel that it had probably been waiting for decades in that rock pile for me to discover it and place it in my garden - because, you know, in the 4.5 billion years of its existence the blink of time it's going to spend in my garden will matter.  I think I may have been a little dizzy from pushing the wheel barrow.  I can't even remember which one it was now, but they are all 4.5 billion years old and all just tickled to be chosen for my garden.  Of this I am certain.

By the last day the work was being done in slow motion - the only speed I had left - but I am done.  In every sense of the word, I am done.  And I feel that the space/time continuum has caught up with me ... I am now 4.5 billion years old too.