After digging rain ditches the past two weekends, I ache in places I didn’t even know I owned. It’s a long dark night of 3 AM aspirin calls and an endless stream of gummy lemon square care bears. My cousin calls us the bitcheswhodigditches. Because the related menfolk never think to lift a finger to help us unless we practically shame them into action. Who wants to do that? It blows up in odd ways later. So we carry on. Like with the weekends when we cleared brush. They did nothing. It was maddening. We were racing both the clock and the incoming storm. As I dig ditches and watch the water seek new courses, I think, this is how people become engineers, by rerouting all those puddles. Gawd, how I loved getting soaked to the bone as I helped my granny channel all that water. The driveway is a swamp. A quagmire. When I was young, we used to dig little roads along the bank above the main water ditch for my brother’s matchbox cars. We elaborated on that transportation theme with tiny trains and even railroad tracks. Unfortunately those drainage ditches have been in disrepair since my grandmother died long ago, and the last atmospheric river—aka Pineapple Express carried an epic amount of water down the hillside. So we restored the old drainage ditches, and helped save the driveway, thus draining a couple of quagmires in the process. A bonus, I found two wheeless matchbox cars with caved in roofs in the gravel. The renovated ditch is ready for the next round of the atmospheric river, the Pineapple Express, which seems to have mysteriously evaporated. Go figure. You really can’t really dig those ditches during the dry season. The impacted ground is like concrete. You need the dirt waterlogged so you can move it, though it weighs a lot more when it’s wet. But it is a work of art to divert and channel and tame that much chocolate colored water, and then to watch it run clear, then tend to the miniature rapids and eddies like a farmer irrigating a field—just like a real creek bed but in a diminutive format. The main source of runoff is coming from a gopher hole in the upper garden, so it’s draining an entire steep hillside like an artesian spring. I write on my Facebook page, Now my left lower back hurts. A lot. I didn’t hurt until after my Covid booster shot. Someone misreads it as a leftover back. If it was my leftover back then I could just leave it behind—along with my behind. Sure, I hurt a little bit after digging ditches, but the strain really slammed me hard after I had my Covid booster shot. It was similar to, but nowhere near as bad as the last time I strained my back scraping old wax off the floors in August. The common denominator for both events is not so much the strain, or work itself, but sitting in the car, or a chair for long periods of time afterwards. A friend advises, Chocolate Cake helps. Works for me. I ask, Do I smear it on my lumbar region? Perhaps with a little ruby portofino on the side? Mark answers, Yes. Devour it with lots of chocolate frosting. Guaranteed to work on your whole body not just the lumbar region. Trust me baby. Hoo boy. Sounds bitchin’. Sounds like good advice to me.
from a Facebook post
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