I recently moved from a little guest house that I’d been living in for fifteen years to a two bedroom house with a great, rustic, overgrown back yard complete with brick patio covered with wood trellising, a quaint seventies type rock fountain and a kidney shaped pool. Just to the side of the patio is a raised area that could be used as a garden and on the other side is a tiny little pond. The pond had originally been built with a small wooden foot bridge over it. Very quaint.
For some odd reason, the previous tenant decided to fill both the raised garden and the pond with sand and had removed the foot bridge from the pond. The landlady said she’d wanted to make the place look like Tahiti. I thought it just made it look silly, so I made an agreement with the landlady that I’d remove the sand and refill the pond with water if she had the foot bridge replaced.
Two weeks ago I finally got around to begin digging the sand out of the pond. Not sure what to do with the sand once it wasn’t in the pond, I figured I’d just put it in the black trash bin that the city provides for each house in Los Angeles. After a short while, I got tired and my back began to ache, so I gave up for the weekend. The trash bin was only about a quarter full of sand. I get tired very quickly these days, it seems. I guess I am fifty-one after all. I wheeled the bin out front for trash collection day and all was well with the world.
This week, I decided it might be best to just hire a day worker to dig the rest of the sand out. I brought the trash bin out back and in very short order the young fellow had filled it to the brim. I helped him drag it out front for collection day and got out big lawn bags for the rest of the sand. He filled about five or six of them, smartly about a quarter full each so they could be picked up with out bursting. I told him to leave those in the back and I’d decide what to do with them later. He was done with the entire task in about an hour and a half. Clearly, he is younger then I.
While dragging the trash bin out front, I thought it may be way too full and therefor way too heavy. I had a vision of the big forked arm that lifts the trash bins up to empty into the top of the garbage trucks straining, and possibly even breaking, from the weight and strain of it. I considered calling the trash department and telling them there was a bin full of sand and getting their recommendations on disposing of it. I also considered taking some of the sand out so it wouldn’t be too heavy. I didn’t do any of these things.
Driving home from the office last Friday sometime after eight p.m. I wondered what I would encounter. Pulling up to my driveway, what I encountered was the black trash bin tipped on it’s side, sand pouring out of it, one wheel broken off and the lid snapped off and laying in the street. I tried to lift the bin up so I could at least drag it from the curb, but it was way too heavy. I briefly considered just leaving it there and going in to get a stiff drink. Of course, it was kind of hanging over into my neighbor’s driveway, so I couldn’t do that. I thought about just shoveling the sand onto the parking strip so I could lift the bin, but then what would I do with the sand. Again, the whole neighbor thing. I’m new in the neighborhood and want to reveal myself more subtly than that.
Finally, I called my writing partner Steve, who came over and helped me scoop sand out into more lawn bags until the bin was light enough to lift to an upright position and drag up my driveway. (Good old Steve.) We also scooped and swept most of the sand from the parking strip and my neighbor’s driveway. I wonder if they or any of the other neighbors were watching all this. I wonder if they were amused.
Now I have five or so garden trash bags full of sand in the back yard, perhaps ten bags full of sand at the side of my driveway, a broken, city supplied trash bin still a quarter filled with sand at the side of my driveway and I haven’t even begun to remove the sand from the little garden area in back.
And the pond still isn’t a pond. I haven’t put any water in it, yet, because the bottom of it is cracked.
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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel “Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend“
