Relative Something

Through the thick and thin of challenges we have faced since we moved to this beautiful place in the country, the one thing that remains solid for us is our foundation of friends and family, near and far. Yesterday was a priceless coincidence of hearing from many of them, all in a very short span of time –primarily because Cyndie happened to check her email, and found messages from both Portugal and Guatemala. We also enjoyed phone calls from family in Boston and on the road home from Hayward, from my friends on the bike trip, and we were blessed by a weekend visit of our son, Julian, and his girlfriend, Allison.

The folks on the bike trip did indeed get wet yesterday. That is one part of the trip that I don’t mind missing at all. I was able to enjoy the rain that fell at our place, in perfect amounts to water our freshly planted grass. Unfortunately, the rain also contributed to keeping the wet spots by the barn, extremely wet.

On Friday, when Cyndie was doing some mowing along the driveway, she got herself stuck, and called me to help get her out. When I arrived, she said the front wheel dropped into a hole. Sure enough, it did. To my surprise, when we backed the tractor out of the hole, I discovered the hole was full of water! It might be hard to discern from the picture on the right, but the spot where this hole full of water is located, is uphill from the barn.

It seems really strange to me how the ground at high spots around here, holds water which logic tells me should be draining downhill to the lowest areas. How can we expect the ground around the barn to dry out, if the areas uphill from there are still saturated?

Out of frustration for waiting to be able to make progress down by the barn, I decided to see if I could advance the project, working by hand. There is just no way they can bring any heavy equipment in to work on this new drive, that doesn’t end up just making it worse. While Julian mowed some of the extremely tall grass by the new driveway loop we are trying to create, I began to fill in the ruts left by the skid loader the last time the crew was here.

We figure that when this area finally begins to dry out, we’d rather have it drying in the condition we want to see, not the rutted mess it has been thus far. After I got about a third of it smoothed out with a rake, Julian and I tapped it down with our shoes. It was so spongy, we couldn’t use anything else. We tested running the garden tractor over it, but that was too much.

The best way to describe the condition of the dirt in the wettest spots is that it is like freshly poured concrete. I was basically troweling it with the rake. I could support my weight with one foot on a spot that was a bit firmer, and then just tap the surface with my other foot, to erase the rake marks.

When it gets dry enough, I’ll go to the next level by driving the garden tractor over it. With any luck, by the time the water is completely gone, we’ll have a foundation of driveway that is as hard as concrete.