Dirty Job

There is a season for everything. I think the season for starting back to blogging is appearing.

I remember when I was in junior high my dad built a cesspool in our yard. Actually, I'm not 100% sure what it was, except that it was a solution to an overflowing septic system. It was a giant hole, and in the hole he stacked cinder block with their holes facing out.

He gave me the job of hauling rocks from a pile on the other end of the yard to this hole. The idea was that I would fill the space between the sides of the hole and the cinder block. The rock pile at the other end of the yard was something like 100ish feet from the destination. I used a red wagon, one of the big ones, to haul the rock. I hauled and hauled. The thing I remember most about the job was how important I felt being chosen to haul the rock. It was a big job I was big enough to be in.

Today by 12 year old son got his first big job. My oldest son at home had dug a new fire pit for us for burning brush and for our backyard camping expeditions. The result of his very fine job was 2 large piles of clay-ish fill dirt and 4 decent piles of topsoil. When I showed him what to do, I showed him other large digging jobs his predecessors had done; two shed foundations, a couple of utility trenches, and, of course, the fire pit. His job - move the piles to a long term storage spot about 30 feet away.

To my surprise he worked without complaint all afternoon and actually moved about 1/3 to 1/2 of the dirt. He never spilled the wheel barrow, and he even put his tools away. I think he's on to something. Life goes on.