“Remoted” – Day 111 (Sunday)

The weather alert
sounded scary.

Sunday of the long weekend was lovely. The morning was cool and uneventful, but there was a weather alert about storms for later in the day, which made getting out to the yard early seem like a better idea than waiting. After the now customary porch sitting and drinking of coffee, reading of a book, and matching candies in a game on my phone, there was a small amount of yard labor which, to the untrained eye, could be interpreted as a middle-aged weirdo pulling out dead grass and playing in some piles of dirt at 8 a.m. 

While hand sorting pieces of slate, brick, assorted rocks, and rusted metal pieces from the dirt dug out to install the fence posts, I recalled the days of my participation in a Kentucky archaeological dig back when I was first living in Tennessee. That was a fun and hard couple weeks at the site of a former store near an iron furnace. 

Brick and rocks and slate from the yard.

During the Kentucky dig we found a hinge, a weight to a scale, bottles, and other assorted stuff. We dug down an inch or so at a time, shook the dirt through a screen, cataloged the items we found, and diagrammed the trench’s various layers of different colored soil and the layer of blackened ash from the year the place burned. The screen used to sift the soil and isolate the treasures was housed in a folding wooden frame, and it took some muscle power to shake it back and forth to sift the sand. This morning I considered grabbing a spare window screen from the basement to sift my dirt but that felt like a bit much. I'm already afraid the neighbors think I'm totally nuts playing in the dirt piles, without adding a window screen to the scenario. 

Ever since unearthing a clay marble and some pieces of broken dishware while planting a garden at the house in Fitchburg a million years ago, I’ve always wanted to set up a proper dig in the yards of the houses that followed, but never got to it. I often imagined going through my Tennessee wooded back yard with a metal detector after learning a Civil War training camp had been located nearby. In six years there I never got to that, largely due to not having a metal detector. Playing in the Lowell backyard dirt piles was a nice way to spend a cool-ish morning. The bad weather never blew in, but it was nice to start the day with getting something done early.

Later, in the blazing heat of the day, the poorly timed task of trimming the unruly rhododendron took place. That thing grows like crazy every year. The trim may have occurred a little late in its season, but that plant has sprawled in every direction and needed attention. Tardy is better than never. There is still much pruning and thinning that needs to happen in the yard. The bleeding heart is exploding out of the bed, some of the hostas have become massive, and the irises are not done being thinned yet. Perennials are more work than I imagined.

Winston and his porn pose.

Meanwhile, inside the house, the dogs were recovering from the stress and fatigue of the fireworks last night and reclined like canines of leisure. When Winston isn't observing the household from under the dining room table, he tends to spread out on the couch like some kind of doggy porn star. Moose, who was cowering in the corner behind the couch during the neighborhood explosives, was in his customary curled up position in the corner of the couch. It was nice to see them so calm after the jitters they had last night.