Sometimes I think I wish I wrote as well as EeksyPeeksy. Then I think if everyone wrote like that, no one would get anything done.

General: Corporal, what was that Dickenson poem? Something with, “The stillness round my form?”

Corporal: I heard a fly buzz when I died;
The stillness round my form
Was like the stillness in the air
Between the heaves of storm.

The eyes beside had wrung them dry,
And breaths were gathering sure
For that last onset, when the king
Be witnessed in his power.

I willed my keepsakes, signed away
What portion of me I
Could make assignable,–and then
There interposed a fly,

With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz,
Between the light and me;
And then the windows failed, and then
I could not see to see.
General: Yeah, that one.

But, anyway, digging: it was one of those one-thing-leads-to-another jobs.

I mentioned my wife wanted me to install the mother of all wading pools this last weekend, which was a weekend of four days here, for me. The pool is 3.6 meters in diameter, and 91 cm deep. The ground must be perfectly level where it is installed atop a layer of fine sand. Leveling the ground necessitates removal of my fern collection, removal of the compost heap, and construction of a retaining wall.

To do the latter, I first had to dig a trench for the foundation and wall along the property line. Since the yard sloped steeply at this point, and the neighbor had already constructed a link fence along the line, a certain amount of contortion was necessary to do the digging.

Since I don’t know the first thing about cinderblock construction, I had to get my father-in-law to help me. Imagine Laurel and Hardy in a gigantic hardware store, with a little Marx Brothers and Abbot & Costello (Who’s on First?) thrown in, driving each other insane. That would be my father-in-law and me shopping for supplies.

Then, digging, digging, digging. Neither planting nor burial, just digging. Then mixing concrete, carrying stuff around, building wall. Backfilling wall. More digging and raking to level things out.

Oh, I forgot mounting the anchors to hold the fence poles. See, if you have a big wading pool, you also need a fence. My wife got the anchors at the hardware store for us. Something totally different than what I told her to get, but, it turns out, better. Stuck three anchors into the wet cement, where they hardened in place. Two more had to go where the wall was older, constructed several years ago. How to anchor them in place?

She rented the biggest power drill I’ve ever seen, with the biggest drill bit I’ve ever seen. It was extremely cool. I asked #1 daughter to take a couple pictures of me holding it, but she just took a picture of my ass. With that drill, a serious workingman drill, I drilled two holes.

Then: quick-drying cement.

“Only mix as much as you can use in 2 minutes,” the directions said. But that stuff was hard in 60 seconds tops. I mixed it too thick to pour into the holes, so I was, like, rolling it into balls the size of the hole diameter, pressing them in, pushing the anchor in on top of them and hammering it into place. Holds really good.

Anyway: more digging. There was still sort of a hump in the middle of the space, so I dug down there and hit a tree stump and finally had to dig a hole. We had cut down a birch tree a couple years ago, it had been growing too close to the house. But it wasn’t cut down far enough at the time, just ground level and a little dirt got piled on top. At the time we hadn’t been planning a pool there.

So I dug down around it, and a friend is bringing his chainsaw over on Tuesday for a little vrrrrm vrrrrm.

By Sunday afternoon, it was raining, most of the raking and digging was done. As soon as the concrete is good and hard, I’ll try to put up the fence along the retaining wall, which will be more fun, getting everything straight.

Oh, I forgot the rose trellis.

We have a climbing rose, pinkish-white and beautiful fragrance, over by the front corner of the house next to the electrical transformer thing, a little concrete tower about 4′ tall where all the underground power lines come together for easy maintenance. Not exactly a transformer, I don’t think, just a junction of some kind.

We bought a trellis for the rose, and two posts to hold the trellis. The posts were to be set into metal anchors, which are hammered about two feet into the ground.

Long metal things that run to a point.

After about 25 minutes of trying various suitable spots for anchors near the rose, hammering and hammering with a sledge hammer onto a 2×4 set into the anchors, but always being stymied because the anchors kept hitting something between 6″ and 1′ down, it finally dawned on me that I was trying to hammer sharp metal anchors into the ground next to a small concrete tower where all sorts of electrical cables were coming together. I dug down a little and, sure enough, I’d been hitting the armored shielding around the cables.

“Exhausted Man Electrocuted,” the headlines would have read.

I took a break, and later found safe spots for the anchors and got the trellis up.