Big Rocks

There’s a religious and work concept of doing the “big rocks” first. The most important things, take care of those, then fill in your space and time with the pebbles and sand later.

Today, Buds and I put the literal big rocks first.

For a long time we’ve pondered how to bridge the marshy swamp that the yard next to our driveway turns into for months every spring. Our house is a low point for the entire neighborhood behind us. When spring rains come every drop of water in this back 40 has to come through our yard.

Briefly, fantasies of some Napoleonic engineering project danced in our heads. We’d have to dig a channel, line it with gravel fill it with pipe and route this water down to the drain.

However, a year ago we also tied the house into the sewer system and that sewer pipe runs on the same path as our hypothetical French drain. The good news is that sewer construction unearthed six very large rocks. These have been piled at the base of our driveway.

Today we took those rocks and lugged them about to make a bridge and a path over our swamps. The first bridge is on the driveway.

This has been a source of unending guilt as our delivery folks always park on the road to the side of our house and then have to negotiate the swamp to drop off a package. We’ve never found a pair of boots abandoned or a FedEx driver elbow deep in the muck (or even, God forbid, a skeleton), but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened.

We have had friends literally lose their shoes when trying to cross in the darkness.

Another trio of rocks became a bridge in the yard to Ginnie’s new swamp plant collection. (The Little Back 40, as she insists on calling it.)

The last rock is going to be an anchor in the garden. A place to sit and relax or pull weeds.

It’s a project we’ve pondered for months, and today it rose to the top of the list. Despite all the difficulties in the world, we love this time to dream and build together.