A Dry Stream Bed is Definitely a Ditch

“Unto your dreaming

When you’re alone

Unplug the TV

Turn off your phone

Get heavy on with digging your ditch”

-- Dave Matthews Band

My husband and I live on the land that his grandparents bought years ago.  We live across a gravel, country road from the home where they lived for some time.  The row of Leyland Cyprus trees that line the way to the pond were planted by his grandfather as was the burning bush that I am digging a ditch to.  Like me, his grandfather was a digger of ditches – definite ditches, to be exact:  When Dave Matthews wrote “Digging a ditch for when I’m old / digging a ditch where stories told,” he might as well have been talking about my husband's grandfather.  He dug so many ditches in his life time that his shovel is as flat as a spatula, like it could have been Paul Bunyan’s flapjack flipper.

 

This past fall my husband’s grandfather past away, and we inherited his shovel.  It feels right here in our home, not just because my husband treasures it, but because I now have an indescribable urge to flatten a shovel. 

I naively planned to begin removing the sod from a portion of our front lawn in order to build a dry stream bed “on any nice day in January or February.”  It is January 22; school has been in session 8 out of 22 days.  Nice days have been few and far between.  I’ve revised my journal entry to “any day that the temperature rises above 45 degrees and the wind doesn’t feel like it’s tearing holes in my skin.”  I’ve squeezed in a couple of hours with my shovel during those.  They were glorious. 

I am eager to get heavy on with digging my ditch.  I want to build a dry stream bed constructed from the rocks we find here and with the strength we find here too.  If we were rich, we could hire a landscaper, but we’re not.  And more importantly if that ever was my way, it no longer is.  When I’m old, I want stories told to my grandkids about my shovel.