the sweetie and i inherited a spectacularly dilapidated fence when we bought our house. fearing it would fall and kill the next door neighbors, or at the very least, the cat that roams their yard, we began to pull down the front sections. this is when we realized why the fence had been put up in the first place. the yard itself is not so bad. it has plenty of spruce and day lilies. but it is also a monument to disuse and neglect and brokenness. there's not a thing in the yard that exists in a functional state, or even in a non fallen over state.
now, you already know we're bordered on two sides by an abandoned factory so this little tribute to not throwing away what is broken is certainly not the most brutal view in the house. but it is also not the mountain we see from quite a few other windows and we'd like to make it just a little bit less depressing. we could probably go next door and pick up the brokenness from the yard, but the neighbor would likely come flying our her door after us. it has been our experience that she generally communicates through yelling and screaming. so we're planting a hedgerow. that's right. one dirt to three rocks. and we're digging. to be fair, it's a fifty foot long section of the yard. not much. we're saving our little pennies to fence the back yard so the dogs can roam free. and so we won't be able to share quite so freely the view of the same neighbor's fifty seven plastic trash bags full of trash that accumulate before someone hauls them off to the dump. although it is a fascinating sight.
so we bought a few plants. some rhododendrons and mountain laurel . evergreen plants with sassy flowers, some spring and some in a few weeks. and figured we'd add a few arborvitae in the spring. foundation plants, the folks who sell plants call them. then all the small stuff later as we're able. and while the sweetie was furiously digging a hole for one of the rhododendrons, i wandered off to find a place to put some potted ferns i knew wouldn't last the winter on the porch. just below the rock wall seemed like a good, shady place with plenty of water. and i got the shovel. and i stabbed it into the dirt. plus three rocks. and it turns out that little saying isn't so accurate. because the shovel went in about an inch. now, i'm not the strongest person in the world, but i know how to use a shovel and i know that when i step my foot on the back of the shovel and put all the pounds i keep on my body behind the force of that step, i should get a little further than an inch.
after several tries, i called the sweetie. he's quite a bit sturdier than i am, with nearly an extra
foot of person and the accompanying pounds of force to get things a little more done. and what he got was about an inch and a half into the dirt. plus three rocks. which you already know is an inaccurate ratio. let's amend it. for every dirt you have seventeen rocks. this is not an arbitrary number i picked just because it is prime. it's what you see when you pull your shovel up from what you intend to be a hole in the ground. those are the small rocks there in the screen. it's a large screen. it fits over the top of a wheelbarrow.so the sweetie established that i was doing what i could with the tools i had so i simply got more tools. i managed to bend the tip of a very sturdy garden trowel on one fierce rock and then my little claw tool came out of the hole with one of its claw fingers bent nearly straight. the tools were finished. they were threatening mutiny. they looked like the sorts of sad metal things we'd find next door. so i adopted a new strategy. i began to dig by hand. it works for the dogs. the little stones came out without protest and i found that the larger ones were easier to grab if i loosened the dirt around them archeology dig style. it was difficult to channel the aggression and fierceness of stabbing a shovel, trowel or claw into the earth into such small, delicate movements, but this poor fern needs a home in the ground if i'm expecting it to survive the winter, so i continued.
until everything stopped. midway down i struck a rock that looked like iron. i'd been so successful pulling out the seventeen rocks to a dirt that i wasn't even worried. i began brushing the dirt from around it, making a trench. small rocks fell away everywhere and even larger rocks were no match for me. word had gotten around, i guess. but this rock, my nemesis, my white whale, was just sitting there, taunting me. moby rock. but i was mad with desire to plant this fern and no giant rock was going to stop me. there was no way to start digging somewhere else. it's all the same. in retrospect, digging within ten feet of the hole i'd started i probably would have ended up unearthing some other section of moby. i dug. i pried. i unearthed enough of this rock to think i had it. but it was like an iceberg. the part i'd cleared was only a tiny part of the monster below. i bent every tool i owned trying to unstick the horrible rock. i pulled so hard i forgot to
breathe and saw stars. i even convinced the sweetie to have a try with the shovel. the rock didn't even move. it just sat there, grinning in its awful rocky way. i am immovable. but in my zeal to dig this hole, i'd forgotten completely what i was doing. i looked at the fern, pulled it from its pot and looked back in the hole at moby. and then i dropped the fern square onto moby's stony head. there was more than enough room. take that, immovable stone. the sweetie helped me fill in the hole with dirt from our compost. there wasn't enough dirt from what came out of the hole to refill it. and i have vanquished my foe, the giant stone. not exactly how i'd planned it, but vanquishing is vanquishing.as i write this, the squirrels are thundering above my head, having some sort of horrible wrestling match. it sounds like maybe a death match. we can only hope. i can't manage so many nemeses all at once.
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