As the Lowe’s truck drove away, I was left with bag after bag of black gravel, shrink-wrapped on pallets and a good deal larger than I had pictured in my head.
These rocks are but the latest adventure in my story that began, the way these things do, with a television commercial. The same one I went on about last week, the one promising how handsome gutters would look on our house. So, we put those fancy new gutters on our little house, which had managed well enough for fifty years without them. And guess what? Those cool new gutters work great. And the new downspouts work even better. One of them fills my three new rain barrels in under an hour. One pours its water straight into “our” vegetable garden. And one has carved a small river between our house and the neighbor’s, which is the exact problem my little gravel project is meant to fix.
The plan is to fill the path with lots and lots of gravel to contain the water, or at least give us something to stand on above the water wonderland, and then to place a few stepping stones so we can cross without soaking our shoes. I ran short of stepping stones because I measured by my stride instead of TWNCNBUIP…will pick up those extra stones tomorrow.
So, back to my project. I started moving the gravel one bag at a time, from the pallet in front of the garage all the way to the back gate. A couple of hours into that, I had the kind of bright idea most people come up with at bag number one. I had a dolly at the Duck! (actually, I didn’t come with up this idea at all, our son sent a message to “never carry what you can roll, never roll what you can leave”) So I took his advice and a little break from hauling gravel and hauled myself over to Norfolk Street to get that two-wheeler. Big mistake. Sitting still for the whole drive gave my muscles all the time they needed to stiffen up on me, and by the time I got home with the dolly I was good and stove up, as my gramma would have said. Seventy-seven years old and still pretending that I’m still twenty-seven. Before I could finish the job, I had to soak in a hot bath full of Epsom salts just to be able to move again.
Did I mention I went in for my annual physical a few weeks ago? The older I get, the more advice I seem to come home with. One of the things my doctor suggested was moving more. The exact prescription was three miles per day. Now, I’ve done pretty well sticking to his plan, but not this morning. No way was I going to walk three miles and then move nine million bags (rounded number) of gravel. Although I am pretty sure I got way more than three miles in anyway, trudging back and forth all afternoon. And shouldn’t the three or four times I get up at night to walk to the bathroom count toward the total? I think they should.
Among the other things the doctor suggested was that I eat more vegetables, which pleased TWWNCBUIP immensely, since this has been our number one point of contention for the last fifty years. She believes vegetables come in beautiful colors and endless varieties and belong in almost every meal, including my morning eggs. I believe the potato is the finest vegetable God ever made, preferably fried, sometimes mashed, and that the lettuce and tomato on my burger are vegetables.
Well, TWWNCBUIP is always thinking, and in an effort to get me excited and “invested” in unusual vegetables, which to me means anything that is not a potato or riding on a burger, she planted a squash in the backyard. That thing is enormous. The leaves are spreading in every direction, but there is nary a sign of anything even remotely resembling actual food. She believes it will happen. I am choosing to remain hopeful that it will not.
Oh, and remember those missing bolts from last week? The ones I accidentally tossed out? Well, their replacements arrived today, in a great big box from H. Potter. Inside that great big box was a small bag of nuts and bolts. Actually two bags of nuts and bolts. And another trellis. Now we have matching trellises. And spare nuts and bolts. I was supposed to learn a lesson from all this. Not quite sure what the lesson was but thinking it may have been something about reading the directions.
You know, when we ordered those three rain barrels I thought we might be overdoing it. Who needs 150 gallons of saved rain? After this week, though, I think we may have underdone it.
All three barrels are full again and there is more rain on the way. If I just had more barrels I could probably keep that squash watered all summer long.
Okay everyone, hope to see you soon!
oh, and to all the dad’s out there, Happy Father’s Day…I’m going to Memphis to be with my boy.
love, Rusty
