December 2020

A week before Christmas and I’m hauling dirt. Or shoveling it, actually—all 600 pounds of it, rain-heavy even though it was tarped in a trailer, out of which boy and I are moving it. It’s been in the trailer since mid-August when our water line blew and had to be replaced—requiring hours of backbreaking labor for both Bills (to save us the big bills) and a large trenching machine. Boy was in his glory, driving this ground-eating rig that looked like a Sunday car for Edward Scissorhands, but the adult involved, ol’ pastor bus driver Burk, pushin’ 60, was less enchanted. Twelve hours on the rental clock, they got their trench dug, the line replaced, got the water going—but what to do with all that dirt?? The little eyesore on wheels has been in the back woods waiting for that Saturday that never came. So today, being a “snow” day for my online schooling boy, suddenly threw itself down as mom’s best idea for Christmas gift ever. “Hey, Will…,” say I, voice dripping with honey and over-promises, “How’d you like to give dad a REALLY cool Christmas present?”

The plan was simple: send strapping 14-year-old boy into woods to empty trailer into a 10’ deep hole he dug during the first week of quarantine. Sort of a fitting end. Why is there a hole 8’ wide and 10’ deep in the middle of our woods? Wellll….it’s like this, you see. We all went down differently at the beginning of the pandemic. Some of us binge watched The Office, some speed-baked, some of us moped, some us mourned. Ellie and I, we refinished furniture and Will, he dug a hole. He dug for days at a time. He dug till you couldn’t see his head anymore, little heap-fuls of dirt flying up out of the deepening crater. No one questioned it. The metaphors of a boy on the cusp of manhood digging holes are without number, are they not? There’s even a book and a movie! Let’s leave it at that. It was the hole, in fact, that led to the tent. Boy went out into the woods the week after Easter and didn’t come back. For two months, he lived and schooled in a six-man tent he set up out there with a cot and a cooler—and two circuit breakers and full electrical hookup for such “modern” appliances as a 1997 TV/VCR and jerry-rigged Wii. We would see him once a day for dinner and a shower. At the dinner table each night we read Walden and My Side of the Mountain, with wilderness boy perched edgily on his chair, itchin’ to get back out to where the stars and night noises called his name.

You would find him there still, shooting at wasps with a BB gun and playing ball-Blast, but it got hot. Virginia hot. All summer the tent stood vacant, our satellite “Covid quarters” should anyone need to emergency quarantine. I was only half joking when I told them I was going to list it on AirBNB. The “Ozark Adventurer.” Mainly I was too sad to see it go. It was like a life raft in the darkest days of the lockdown—through long, cold, rainy spring of virtual school and boomerang college and the shredded wreck of Sophie’s senior year, there it stood—steadfast little shelter beneath the trees, weathering storms big and small. But all, things, I tell you, all things are connected. When our well line shorted out for all the standing water out there, turns out the trench had to cut right through Walden world, so Will took down the tent and they used it to cover the massive pile of dirt shoveled into our bike trailer. Technically, it’s his dirt and so only right that he should put it back. That I’m selling the job as a “gift of service” to his father is just a page from my dog-eared copy of Parenting for Geniuses.

It’s not anything usual for me to hand my 14-year-old the keys to the only remaining car in the driveway, knowing full well it will involve driving across the back yard and into the woods, putting it in reverse and then maneuvering between the trees to hook up a trailer. What am I, nuts? says the moment to me. What is noteworthy is that said vehicle has JUST been returned only this morning from the body shop, having been “egged” over Thanksgiving break by some 16-year old boys on a prank. Huh. How ‘bout that. The contemplation of ironies here could outlast… a… pandemic. When I say “the paint hadn’t even dried,” I mean it. Guy at the body shop said let it cure. Okay—well, isn’t off-roading a kind of cure? Will and I wouldn’t have chosen the spotlessly clean one for this job, but the other car left for Blacksburg this morning, carrying my college junior to meet her roommate for an overnight. It’s the first time Ellie has left the house since Thanksgiving, when she came home from GMU for the end of the semester online. There’s been a lot of that on college campuses this year: “Go home and don’t come back.” All the grind of classes and none of the fun that makes—er, made college life so fun. Her first grounding occurred upon landing at the Richmond airport last March, after a wonderful weekend getaway to her grandmother’s turned into the 10-month-long “weekend” we’ve all been living through. Now she is going to stay in a hotel. Alone. For the first time. So, yeah, we gave all of our children sharp knives and let them handle heavy machinery when they were toddlers, too. Get this helicopter outta here.

Sense of time is definitely dulled, which is probably why Will, eyeing the dirt pile, responded “coupla hours” to my question about how long it would take. He’s still out there, slogging away. What is it with cold rain and endless mud around here? Did I mention that he and I got the trailer stuck not once but twice, requiring a jack, bricks, planks of scrap wood—and profanity. “You can swear if you want to,” I finally said to my son, an hour and easily a foot deep into it, as we both alternately yanked, pulled, pushed in desperation to get the job done under deadline. Nothing was going right. The jack slipped off every time we got it within a quarter inch of getting it on the hitch, or off, the car was so wedged between trees there was no room to pull forward, or back up, the trailer weighed as much as a house. I let fly and saw Will eye me funny, trying to hide his surprise, still a little sparkly grin escaping from his braces. He shook his head, pocketed the invite, and kept jacking up the trailer for our third attempt. I think he was saving his epithet for the victory scream. Later, coming out the back door to resume helping him after going in to resolve Ellie’s moderately alarmed Momwhatdo??! from three hours away (The hotel won’t let her into the room since the reservation’s in my name), I see him throw back his head and swear at the sky.

Then I am standing directly behind my own vehicle, which is coming straight at me, propelled backwards by a slightly undersized illegal driver. I must be nuts, say the trees to me. He swings wide though I am waving my hands frantically and shooing him away from the mud I can see beneath the leaves. Still we manage to get it stuck up to the wheel well. Ah, yep, say the trees. Though we’ve been at I this “quick gift” for over an hour, boy hops out and surveys this pickle with a grin and a shake of his head. Just one more disaster son, just one more for the ride. What is a day if not a detour from all that was planned? Taking it in stride, he is off to the shed for bricks, planks, crow bars, what-have-you. I start shoveling our most obvious resource—dirt—into the giant ruts and smacking them down with the shovel. Carefully, slowly, as if his thinking and his engineering are a single expression, Will lays his plank configuration. He is taking his time as if we have it; he is so deliberate I literally can hear the wheels turning—and I so wish they were. I am impatient for this sort of thing. Dimly I recall Sophie needing the car at 2 pm and something more pressing than mud-wrestling that I had on my schedule for the afternoon. Having got us in to this, my commitment level is waning. But not for boy—unlike his chores, his homework, his instrument and every other task life hands him, in this arena he is going to finish the job. His patience is uncanny, his focus pure. You would kind-of want him aboard the Apollo 13 and kind-of not. His boots are mud-caked cinderblocks as he hops back in the car for another go. Big mucky sucky lurching heave, and the trailer pulls free. If this were a sick comedy it—the newly repaired vehicle—would rocket forward into the trees that are but inches away. But it is not that. It is a success story my boy tells every time he puts his heart and mind to something. Well, maybe scratch that last bit. Heart. His mind is a dangerous thing.

Now he is backing, and re-backing and re-backing the trailer, trying not to jackknife it on the wet, slippery leaves, headed ever so slowly toward the big hole, when the back wheel hits something we can’t see beneath the ground cover: the “vent” stack for the cave. Ooops, forgot about that. Yes, he dug a tunnel into the side of the hole because… because…because… (Hard stop here. The causal explanations with Will often run dry). If you are picturing this then yes, it was exactly like having a 106-pound mole on our property all spring. We are sunk again. This time, the rear left tire is in so deep that one side of the trailer rests completely on the ground. It’s knelt down like an overloaded camel and it ain’t gettin’ up. In the midst of our demise Sophie appears, freshly showered and sparkly and looking for “her” car for the fun afternoon she’s cooked up. Uh, “Hi daughter”? (weeping smiley-face emoji here). “About the car….” She surveys the situation with a look of increasingly pained incredulity, impatience, and disbelief, really, about the amount of exposed earth, snapped undergrowth, leaves all torn up and obvious gridlock going on here and it—all of that—a neatly-packaged communiqué, coming through her eyes. I resist the urge to hand her a shovel, and I feel that telltale hysteria trying to dig its way to the surface. Then I see our surroundings through her eyes. It’s just my back woods, right? So why does it look like an 18-wheeler doing 80 flipped and skidded to a fiery apocalyptic halt here?  

There is no hope for the dirt; the trailer is no longer towable. And the car Sophie wants is still hooked to the trailer, world’s biggest paperweight. Our regroup/workaround scroll is fast shutting down with only one option remaining: Dig it out by hand, shovelful by shovelful and fling it into the hole 20 feet away. For real? I know from helping that the rain-soaked dirt is heavy as wet cement. Silently I see him take up the shovel, his creativity and ingenuity finally extinguishing as he shoulders the reality weighing on us like that 10-ton trailer: to finish the job the only way he can, throwing it, shovelful by shovelful back into the hole the way it came out, one heavy heap at a time. The latter part I observe from inside, tied to my own tasks that have deadlines. Once again the dirt flies, another metaphor that begs for play around here. Boy un-digging a hole. In the freezing wet mist of a “snow” day, trying to put back, to restore, the world to rights. He is one long response to the mishaps and setbacks of a typical day around here. Like we’re a pandemic training school or something. Things like this, my son, things like Ellie’s emergency surgery this summer or Sophie’s car accident last summer, like all that we’ve lost and surrendered and all the stuckness of our lives at the moment–things like this, they tell you what you are made of. And you, my son, are made of love as strong as steel. Whoever thought of an undoing as a gift. But it is. His father will come in tonight after not one but two day jobs, worn out from another day out in the world. Here Dad, I got you empty, so you can have full. I worked all day to give you what you want most of all…time. And I didn’t spend anything! Except myself.

After Sophie has gone, removing our best wheels for the project, I hear the tractor fire up its low rumble and see as he comes triumphantly out from the woods towing the filthiest mud-coated little buddy on wheels—but it is empty, gloriously empty! “Yeah,” says boy, “I thought I might as well wash it off.” Then, as the plan goes, he is going to drive the trailer back to the exact spot it has occupied for the past four months, replace the tarps half falling off just so, and let it stand bearing its gift of nothing until Christmas day, when he and I will rig up some sort of gift to place under the tree that will clue Bill to go outside into the woods to behold what has been done on his behalf. Maybe we’ll wrap up a clue in a little box under the tree? Maybe the two of us will draft some fun treasure hunt that ends at the trailer, and when you peel back the tarp there will be a giant red bow, signaling the gift. Maybe we’ll make a sign directing him to the back woods. Maybe, I suggest to Will, maybe we could just leave it and let Dad find it this way and just wonder what happened? I think of the tire ruts, the mud splattered trees, the leaves disturbed like a pair of yetis got into a tussle out there—probably the hiding in plain sight won’t go as well. In any case, in our family we’ve always loved surprises and I know Will is beside himself with happiness and pride to have produced a big one. We have the whole week to think on how to gift it.

Boy can’t even make it one day. I know before he appears on the stairs long after dinner, after the evening and supposedly on his way to bed, what this is about. Flashlight in hand and fumbling for some articulate way to engage his dad and get him out the backdoor—”What do you mean ‘we have to check the dirt’?” Huh? “It’s 30 degrees out, son. I’m not going out there.” But Will is insistent (Really, my boy??! ‘We have to check the dirt’? You might have given that over to me, son….if I can think up the gift I can surely invent the grounds…) But there they go, my two trench-diggers, crossing the back yard in darkness. Then from the woods I hear Bill’s cry of surprise and pleasure. I picture boy’s happiness as one of those games at the county fair—the “strong man” booth I think it’s called, a test of manly strength and bravado—where you hammer down, hard as you can, to launch a little puck all the way up to ring the bell. In this way, on the Esteem-O-Meter, his father has just sent it through the roof. I can’t see them in the dark woods, but I know the gift being exchanged there.

Maybe there really is no such thing as a quick gift. If it’s the one, it is surely not the other. This backbreaker, man-maker of a job has gifted so many—me with my blissfully, finally empty woods—now wooding and being beautiful and bare from my kitchen window. That late-fall-into-winter-time, like a last call. I love it. And now, minus a few—er, “tire tracks” which will fade with time, I have the view (almost) as unpopulated as it was meant to be. (For Mother’s Day I’m totally going for all those decaying bike ramps out there…) And his father—a half a day given back, possibly more, and who doesn’t love to wake up on a weekend to more time. The biggest gift, though—no surprise, comes to the boy who gave it. He is muddier than imaginable and probably worn out and sore, but he won’t admit to any of it and is still smiling with his windburned face and red raw hands, headed for a shower. The questions this week, as we approach THE day, will be all about the presents under the tree. Like, what—is he eight again? (sometimes for real, he is.) Bugging and berating me:

Whadja get me for Christmas mom? Whadja get me, huh?

I have this to answer him: yourself.

Can I open one early? Can I?

You just did.