Most mornings these days I wake up wondering if I can still dig a hole.
A lot of projects on our old farm require shoving a shovel in the ground and by early December things get a little dicey. The nights get darker and colder and when the ground finally does freeze it takes explosives to put in post holes.
This business of post holes has been wearing on me lately because of something a friend of mine said back in October. I had hired him to paint my house, and he walked up to me one warm afternoon and said, “Those clapboards under your side door feel a bit punky. You might want to poke around there a little.” He said this while standing sideways to me and peering down askance, as if my left shoe greatly interested him.
He knew something.
So I poked.
I peeled back a clapboard, took my longest screwdriver, and poked. And I buried that screwdriver right to the hilt in my rotted sill.
I tacked the clapboard back on and stood up.
“Just put the caulk to it, Rob,” I said.
“No,” he said. “You ought to fix that.”
Well, one thing led to another and then I was field-dressing my house. In less time than it takes to drink a cup of coffee I had skinned off four courses of clapboards and was raking my fingers through woody entrails the consistency of cold oatmeal. This led to yanking off my front porch so I could follow that insidious vein of brown sill-rot south toward the heart of the house. I got back into good wood just before I panicked, and just before I got to the dining room.
That led to three weekends of ripping out more rotted wood, heaving on crowbars, slamming pressure treated lumber into tight places with a sledgehammer, driving in lag bolts, squirting expanding foam into every suspicious woody orifice, and slapping new clapboards on—which led me all the way back to the caulk.
“Just put the caulk to it, Rob,” I said, finally.
“Okay,” he said.
Great, I was all set—except now my side door hung twenty-eight inches off the ground because the porch was gone. And that meant my wife would have to lift our garage door all winter to get into the house. Then she would have to walk across a floor strewn with cast-off summer things and it would be dark because there is no light switch. And I love my wife so that meant I needed to rebuild the porch. And that, naturally, led all the way back to post holes. (This story is the old-house version of the Circle of Life, where, eventually, all things lead back to digging holes.)
So I dug in my spare time: before work, during Saturdays at halftime, after church. I dug while smug cats watched me from the windows. I pried rocks out of deep holes in the evenings, lighting the dooryard with the headlights from my car. And each night got darker and colder and that horrid frost sunk deeper, grabbing the earth like a clamp. On the fourth morning I had to swing a pickaxe to get through the crust.
As I write this, the porch is half done, I’m still three holes short, and they say temperatures will dip into the teens this week. So I will hurry.
I will hurry because our garage door is very heavy and my wife will be carrying things. She needs sure footing and no heavy lifting. She needs nice wide steps and a clear path lighted by the warm glow that always spills out from the kitchen window. And it’s December and she needs hope for spring, a sign, the promise of a someday-place where she can plant cherry tomatoes in pots, train morning glories up railings, and sip tea while watching the new sun rise up over our meadow.
Most of all, she needs to know how much those things matter to me.
I can’t think of a better reason to get up tomorrow at 5:30, park the car on the lawn, flip on the high-beams, screw my hat down over my cold ears, and start swinging that pickaxe again.
First published December, 2006