Going With the Flow

Last updated on 1/29/2023

When I was a kid, we had a little stream that ran behind our house. I spent hours, sometimes whole days down there mucking around, hunting for crawfish, arranging and rearranging the rocks into a series of cascading pools. At first I tried to wear boots and stay dry, but I decided that by dispensing with all that and going barefoot, I could do a much better job, and also ruin less clothing. I suppose the ultimate extension of this logic would have been for me to dispense with clothing altogether, but this was in Ohio apple country and not Haight-Ashbury. Poor old mom would wig when I showed up naked, muddy and dripping at the door actually expecting to be allowed in the house.

I hadn’t thought about this in years until the recent deluge. We have a drainage ditch in front of our house that has somehow gone off course so that the water runs up beside the pavement and undercuts it. Not a good situation, and also not a fun job that is first on the List of Stuff-You-Must-Do. “I really must fix that someday,” I’d say, and then forget about it. Until this weekend, when I HAD to go out and do something about it because the river out there was spilling over into the street.

So I put on the mud boots and a plastic poncho and went out in the middle of a downpour because it had been downpouring for 6 days straight and I thought maybe I heard the Lord’s voice. As you undoubtedly have experienced, there is nothing like doing a really filthy dirty job in your yard to bring out your neighbors in droves. (If you have a neighbor who owes you money, I suggest you go out and start cleaning up the dog crap in your yard. They will appear as if by magic.) People I hadn’t seen in YEARS stopped and rolled down their car windows just enough to taunt me cheerfully. “Are you NUTS?!,” my neighbor asked me. She thought I was weeding.

“Well, ya see, it’s easier to do this when you can see where the water’s goin’,” I tried to explain, but no one stopped long enough to listen. Sheesh — what, are they gonna melt? People are so scared of mother nature these days. It started to rain even harder, really pounding down on me. The poncho was startin’ to steam up and get sweaty inside. Outside the plastic, I was soaked through. I stepped in a pool deep enough to get over the top of my boot and fill it up with chilly black water. Still I labored on, scraping the sod out of the ditch and using it to dam up the low spots. Even though my back was starting to hurt, I suddenly realized I was actually HAVING FUN just going with the flow.

“What kind of a masochist am I?” I wondered, the rain dripping off my nose. Then I remembered my sodden childhood and realized that fate once again had placed me in a ditch overflowing with muddy water. Literally, I mean, not metaphorically, although that’s a topic for another day. For once, my youth had prepared me for something of practical use later in life. Isn’t it great to have perspective?