Moving rocks around my yard

is like revising a piece of writing. Or rather, I guess I should say, revising a piece of writing is like moving rocks around my yard. I don't know how to talk about the writing process except by comparing it to some other activity, otherwise it sounds like this: I wrote a thing. I took it apart. I put it back together. Let me tell you about the rocks instead.

What happened was we moved into our new-old house and there was a koi pond in the backyard and we didn't want a koi pond in the backyard. Like all of the projects in our new-old house, taking out the koi pond ended up being a much bigger deal than I would've imagined at the start of-- let's call it the "Envisioning Stage." 

What I envisioned was not a koi pond but an herb garden. I thought it would take an afternoon, maybe two, to give away the fish, drain the water, empty out the rocks, fill the hole up with dirt and plant herbs. If it's not obvious yet, I was a ding dong. 

The actual process was longer and messier and possibly caused long term damage to my shoulder joints. It was the rocks that nearly did me in. My initial plan was to move them out of the way slightly, just enough to get at the rubber liner underneath. Cut away the lining and nudge the rocks back into the hole. 

But the hole went down so deep and there were so many layers of rocks. Some were more like boulders. Some were the size of gravel. Some was sand. Lots of sand. And where the hell was the liner? Several days into the project, without realizing it, I'd created a precarious wall of rocks just outside the mucky former koi pond, and there I was in the center, still digging in the mud. 

To avoid an avalanche on myself, I started moving the rocks into the driveway, first just to get them out of the way, but later, in an attempt to see what I had. How many rocks were there? What were their various sizes and shapes? A few of the rocks were interesting. Maybe I'd want to keep them for some future gardening project? Cut to: I lost myself in a several-weeks-long digression of rock organization. 

Winter came. 

The hole filled up with rain and froze, the rocks still piled up in the driveway. I was sick of looking at them. In spring I thought I might be ready to try again, but the weather was sucky. It rained a lot. Or I'd have to work. On a rare, free, weather-cooperating day, I'd climb into the hole and chuck out a rock or two, but my heart wasn't really in it. The project was starting to seem stupid. 

And then we had a global pandemic, and I needed something to think about besides the global pandemic. Why not finish digging up the remainder of the damn rocks? Cut out the liner and shove everything back in once and for all. It took a good month in which I swore a lot and pinched my fingers and scraped my legs and tried to ignore the disturbing-sounding pops and creaks emanating from my shoulder joints. 

When I was finished, a friend from work brought me herb clippings from her garden, and we stood awkwardly facing each other while properly socially distant in my driveway. The garden surprised me by taking off on its own, the small clippings rooting and spreading out to fill the space and beyond. Sometimes I sit out on the patio and try to remember the hole, the rocks-- all of that raw hard work, but truthfully, it's kind of a blurry memory, thank God. 

Anyway, this is the long way of saying that I'm halfway (who am I kidding? I'm not anywhere near halfway! Haha!) into the revision of a writing project, and all I can see in front of me are the rocks, but whatever. 

If moving rocks has taught me anything, it's that if I keep digging through them and flinging them around, eventually I'll end up with a lovely herb garden. 

The end. 

(Before)

(This is where I am now) 

(The future)

Radical Deconstruction of a Koi Pond

When we bought this house, we inherited a koi pond and we didn't want a koi pond.

First, let me say, I have nothing against koi ponds. Our next door neighbors at our previous house have a koi pond and when we sat outside on their patio, I liked to look at the fish.

They have a big one that I called the Dr. Seuss Fish because it was enormous and could stick half of its body out of the water and it looked like any second it was going to crawl right out and walk across the patio. I told my neighbor, one of these days, there's going to be a knock on your door and you're going to look down, and it's going to be the fish.

Dr. Seuss Fish

Anyway, we inherited a koi pond and we didn't want a koi pond. We didn't know how to take care of it and we didn't really want to learn. The previous owner didn't leave behind instructions. She did leave a bag of food, but when were we supposed to feed the fish? And how much? I called our previous next door neighbor. Can you help us with the koi pond? I asked.

What I meant was, Can you take the fish out of the koi pond and put them in your koi pond?

He said, How many fish do you have?

I said, I don't know. Maybe five?

A few weeks later, he came over with a bucket and a net. He stepped into the pond and started swinging the net around. You've got more than five, he said. Also, he told us the pump was broken and something about the filter. We were all surprised when he pulled more than 25 fish out of the water.

After he left, my husband and I yanked out the overgrown vegetation and promptly found four or five more fish. The plan was we'd catch them, carry them over to our old neighbors' and begin dismantling the koi pond. The plan quickly went awry. For one thing, it was 95 degrees every day and who wanted to be outside. My husband had a hard time catching the fish. He got some and put them into a bucket, but we kept finding more. It was amazing how fast they were and how they could find hiding places in what was left of the vegetation.

I was getting nervous about the ones in the bucket. Every morning I'd go out with the dog and expect to find them floating on the surface, dead. 

One morning I went out and did my usual peek into the bucket and there was nothing there. No dead fish. No live fish. Just water. I called my husband in a panic, thinking maybe he'd dumped them all back into the pond? But no. Something must've gotten them, he said.

A raccoon? A cat? But wouldn't that have knocked over the bucket?

A friend suggested that it was a hawk. It looked like whatever fish had been left in the pond had been snatched away by the hawk too. Not to mix metaphors, but when I'd yanked out all of the vegetation, I'd basically left the poor fish out there like sitting ducks.

That night, before we'd hardly had time to process the deaths we'd inadvertently caused, we realized the empty pond had become a breeding ground for mosquitoes. My husband punctured the lining to drain it and added some vegetable oil to the water, something we'd read online would keep mosquito larva from hatching.

By then the koi pond looked like a toxic waste dump. Dead plant stalks, a few oily puddles, and a mosquito graveyard.

A week later and the weather broke. This weekend it looked like we could really take some time out there to dismantle the thing once and for all. Clean up the muck. Pull out the punctured lining. Fill in the big hole.

But first, we found a fish! I have no idea how it made it through the destruction but there it was, an orange flicker in a mucky puddle. My husband caught it and took it across town to be reunited with its old friends.

The End


Tune in next time for the story of the newly discovered raccoon family living in our broken down shed.