The Rocks and the Hard Place
Why not just hang up the towel and call the fight? Bad guy wins. Ugh. I hate those sentences so up close and personal. My cynical self rises like a toxic dump on the horizon. Face the facts, my pretty, the mean ones are smarter, craftier, and avid to rile at least one corner of a local neighborhood down to its bones. Or at least down to its pipes.
The County’s excavation of our friends’ backyard to access the main sewer line’s compromised pipes had been complicated by the simultaneous delivery of four square yards of river rock, previously ordered and dumped on the bark next to their driveway. After the County back-filled the yawning hole and smoothed the surface of all that turned earth, the homeowners shuttled the melange of rock from the dumped pile to the imagined river rock border, starting with the space made blank by the County’s handiwork. After two days of labor, progress was visible. Phew.
Imagine the collective gasps after the discovery that a gurgling spring had developed around the newly-nested rocks. Fast forward to weekend phone calls, to unlocking the back gate in multiple deja vus, then overlay all the activity with the high-decibel barking of the family’s dogs. Heighten the tension with the report that the necessary repair would require access through the adjoining yard of a neighbor. A not-so-neighborly sort.
The County sewer workers had nicked the fresh water pipe when they back-filled the massive hole, but the water district would have to fix the fresh water line damage. In other words, disagreeableness seeped into the incident from both entities, one responsible for waste water, the other for clean. But now, a more insidious unlikelihood dangled before the frustrated, helpless homeowners. The neighbor whose yard from which the access was required had flat out refused the crew entry. The door went unanswered on the first attempt at contact. On the second, “You’re not coming in my backyard!” or something to that effect was the reply to the district’s request, water still gurgling from the compromised pipe. The next step required legal action to prod the defiant neighbor. That would take time.
This cloudy morning I’m outside raking up the first fallen leaves from Mama Burr and enjoying the familiar whoosh and crackle of the oak’s dead leaves when I stop and rest my hands on the rake handle like a philosopher and wonder: Why is it that one person has the power to make life harder for the rest of us? Evidence rattles my spirit as I think of the politician’s heels buried in the shit of his own ambition and disinterested in the votes of the people, the corporate smugness of a Silicon Valley magnate denying social media’s harm to young women, a celebrity’s hubris and disregard for the humanity of transgender souls, and the smaller, local story of the cantankerous neighbor’s ill will.
My shoulders shrug as I get back to the task at hand, raking the spent leaves of the season into something more useful, a compost pile. A mockingbird’s song raises my spirits as I recall another detail of my friends’ story, the part where they spot a small woman rolling a sunshine-yellow wheelbarrow up the hill toward their house. She parks the cheerful, one-wheeled tub by the mountain of rocks on the bark near their driveway. “I thought this might help,” she says. And it does.
