jumpingfish

“I’m pretty good with a shovel,” I told Gilbert. “I’ll dig the hole.”

We are replacing our main circuit breaker panel, and we have to put in a new grounding system in order to be code compliant. Gilbert’s attempts to drive two 8-foot grounding rods had (unsurprisingly) failed, since there’s solid limestone four or five feet down. I was offering to do the digging for the city’s alternative grounding scheme: a 3 foot x 3 foot steel plate buried three feet down.

On Friday, Gilbert said we could do two smaller plates rather than one big one.

“I’ll dig the holes,” I told him.

I started today at 2:00. The sun had just passed behind the eves of the roof, so I was in the shade. 

There was gravel below the loamy garden topsoil, which was not a surprise. And then I hit black clay that made me set my shovel aside. I started using a post-hole digger (a hard way to dig two 1 foot x 2 foot holes). 

3:00 came and went. Then 4:00 came. And 5:00.

After 18 inches of black clay, there was another 18 inches of reddish clay. It was grueling work. The clay didn’t fall off of the post-hole digger, but the fair and industrious Trudy came to the rescue, scraping the gunk off the blades so that I wouldn’t have to bend over after each load.

6:00 came and went.

I hit solid rock and bent the blade of my grandfather’s post-hole digger. This is bulky-trash weekend in our neighborhood, and the salvaging/scavanging/recycling trucks have been driving up and down the streets for two days. I was mighty tempted to set the bent post-hole digger out by the curb, but Trudy would have nothing to do with it.

“You can’t get rid of your grandfather’s post-hole digger,” she said.

Ok, but I couldn’t use it, either. So I went begging: first to Ron who has a long rock-bar which sadly is in a shed 30 miles away, and then to Bill who loaned me a rock bar and his heavy-duty post-hole digger.

By the time 8:30 rolled around, the deed was finally done. I could barely speak.

Let’s just say that I might be good with a shovel, but with a post-hole digger in gunk — not so much.

We sat on the bench enjoying the soft ground and the cool fresh air that last night’s storm brought — and look what else.

Vyas and I had just finished testing our software. It was an end-to-end test of some automated data flows: moving data about, transforming it, passing it on to other systems and finally modifying the output of a web application. The two of us had worked closely for a couple weeks, and we were in a mood to congratulate ourselves.

“Did you ever watch Fractured Fairytales?” I Skyped him. I knew the answer, but I asked anyway.

“Ha ha. No. Why?” he replied. 

“There used to be this two-headed dragon,” I explained. “It (or they) would get into all kinds of trouble, wreaking havoc and so on. And when their pillaging was thru, they would look at each other and say (in unison)… Teamwork! Teamwork! That’s what counts! And as they shook hands, they would say (again in unison), Yeaaaaaaah!”

“Lol,” Vyas wrote. “Yeah!”

As Trudy and Izzy celebrated the last show of Legally Blonde, I sat in the front yard watching the afternoon sun light up the orange and pink blossoms of the Coneflowers. I was feeling guilty, having participated not one iota in Miss Izzy’s stage debut, leaving the training and logistics to the fair and industrious Trudy.

I sat in guilt-ridden silence watching the bees on the Coneflowers, enjoying the cool breeze and the smell of BBQ blowing over from the neighbors’ backyard. The show had long been over. The day was coming to an end. And in the silence of my self-imposed solitary confinement, it occurred to me that perhaps Trudy and Izzy had gone to the cast party.

Then, as I was huddling over a blossom watching a bee, a Mockingbird flew by and landed in the Agarita. I looked over to see it gulping down the red berries that had ripened overnight. I watched the bird. The bird watched me and then flew around to the Lantana beside the mailbox where a week ago there were pink and yellow and white blossoms but now there were… ripe berries.

What would you rather be doing on a Sunday late afternoon: celebrating at a cast party or contemplating bees, birds and berries? Wait — don’t answer that.

I worked late today. The fair and industrious Trudy had taken Miss Izzy to the university, where she (Miss Izzy) has a speaking role in a musical version of Legally Blonde. It’s been a lot of work training Miss Izzy and carting her off to campus to hang out with her theater friends, and I have helped not a bit I confess, today being no exception. Instead, I worked late knowing that I wouldn’t be missed at home.

It was absolutely quiet when I finished. The office lights clicked on as I made my way to the outside door. A vacuum cleaner blocked the hallway where it had been positioned by the cleaning staff who were working diligently in some other area of the building. All the desks were empty.

Outside, it was that time of day when the sun has set but it hasn’t begun to get dark. The sky was broken clouds with pastel blue showing thru, the rain having gone. The air was glowing, something about the color of the green in the trees. And there was a clean freshness about, maybe because of the rain that had fallen. Some birds were singing in the trees: a Titmouse nearby and a Mourning Dove somewhere far away.

As I walked across the parking lot, these sensations all hit me at the same time. The glow in the sky. The warmth of the air. The dampness from the rain. The birdsong.

And for a brief moment I was taken back to Michigan. It was a summer day. I was young. Wait! Where in Michigan? Where was it? Where was I? What was that feeling, again? How old was I? Dang, I lost it. Maybe if I close my eyes and breathe in the sweet air again. Nope. As quickly as I was transported there, I was back again in a parking lot in Central Texas.