I have had a very busy day.
I thought I would tidy the yard.
This has not been without its perils. I am still wincing at the recollection of the pain that resulted when I had to tug out the splinter that got stuck down my fingernail, but apart from that it has been an enormously fruitful and satisfactory experience.
Mark had hauled some firewood back from the farm and left it in the house before he went away. This was all splendid stuff, and I did not want to waste it just on me, it was the sort of nice-smelling logs that get saved for Christmas. I dragged it all back outside and stacked it tidily on the firewood shelves.
These had been a mess. I had to tidy them up first.
There were various lumps of potential firewood loafing about the yard, stuff that has been dumped by builders and neighbours, and I cut that up. Then it dawned on me that for the first time in years and years I could see the Second Shed.
You might not even know about this. It is an accessory to Mark’s primary shed in which he intends to place an outside lavatory. He has plumbed in the water and the waste pipe but never quite got round to attaching the lavatory, which eventually I unearthed standing forlornly in the back of the shed.
It was underneath a very lot of rubbish.
There was a huge stack of wood, some of which had the appearance of Wood Mark Is Saving For Something, but most of it was just bits of pallet and the inside of a stud partition wall.
I left three or four bits that looked as though they would make reasonable shelves and cut the rest up. Then I stacked it tidily on top of the other tidily stacked wood on my firewood shelves.
Once the wood was gone I could see the rest of the clutter.
There was a bag of cement which had inconveniently turned into a stone. There was a leaking bag of sand and a very lot of unidentifiable bits of ancient and rusty iron. There was a number plate for a vehicle I was entirely certain we had never owned. There was the end of a roll of fibreglass insulation, which appeared to have been partially eaten. The bits that had not been eaten had been scattered all over the shed, like the sort of snowfall which has coincided with an outing for incontinent dogs.
There were a very lot of spiders. Every time I lifted something up, something black and terrified scuttled away and shot off into one of the cracks in the wall.
Some of the spiders were very large. They must have been living on baby rats.
I filled Oliver’s car and dispatched him to the tip.
The problem was that there had been a fairly substantial and industrious Rat Housing Programme going on. It was more than obvious that an extensive network of subterranean tunnels had been constructed, but that unlike the inhabitants of Colditz, they had not been carefully filling their trouser turn-ups with the soil and taking it off to dump it somewhere else. They had just burrowed it all out into a massive soily heap, which had spread itself everywhere, and which I needed a shovel and a bucket to remove.
I shovelled it out and tipped it on the flower beds.
I was running out of time by then, which was a nuisance, otherwise I would have considered constructing some of the shelves, but it was late, and I didn’t. Instead I stacked the saved bits of wood next to the useless lavatory and placed Mark’s box of plumbing fittings next to it.
When I stood back the yard had become enormous.
I swept it and shovelled the sawdust into the dustbin and surveyed my newly tidy kingdom.
Mark will be home in a week and so it will not stay perfectly tidy and lovely for very long.
I am going to enjoy it while I can.
