For those of you not familiar with the term: septic tank. . . it is a holding device that accepts the gray water and sewage in a residence not served by city septic service lines. Tanks are served by drainage channels that help siphon off overflow, etc.
With this opener, I bet you're dying to read more. I can hear you now,
"Great! She's writing about sewage. How pleasant?!"
It's not pleasant but it is inescapable. Into each life, a little sewage must fall.
Can sewage shimmer? I want my Saturdays to shimmer with potential, with the supernatural, the miraculous. This Saturday seems to be mired in a stinky cesspool of limited options and borderline despair. Life sometimes does a wonderful job of crapping on one's happy especially if a significant portion of that happiness has been an illusion.
While there is a bit part of me that longs for an eternal, mystical youth that floats along on pixie dust and gossamer wings, it just isn't my destiny. There is no pixie dust and no gossamer wing is going to hold me up. No, if I'm to discover the shimmer, the magic, the mystical in my daily life, I'm going to have to look for it while face down in a nasty mud puddle into which a little sewage has seeped.
When I was a kid, my Grandma Laux's ("Gram" to me) house had a small drainage ditch that ran outside of the bathroom. It came up along side a lovely flower bed complete with a metal wishing well. The grass on the banks of this small trench was always lush and green. It seems the kind of place the fairies would have played. But this ditch was not the stuff of fantasy. It was sewage draining from the bathroom. It often smelled foul and occasionally, we'd step in in and cover our tennis shoes or bare feet with its nasty gray goo. Then, with much noise and drama, we'd race to the outside water faucet and rinse off our foot/shoe (or feet/shoes if you were so lucky) loudly squealing:
"YUCK, OOH . . . DISGUSTING!"
I'd forgotten all about that ditch until now. The memory is so strong that I can even smell that ditches peculiar and unpleasant odor.
That memory rapidly rolls into another.
When still quite small and living on my Grandparents farm after they'd moved to town, the septic tank began to bubble. Outside the bathroom, under a large fir tree, the most amazing lifting of sod occurred. Somehow, the septic tank burst its confinement underground. The collecting gases and matter caused the sod above the tank to rise in a perfect mound. Threatened with a certain horrible death if I walked across it, I studied this spot from a safe distance, occasionally tossing a rock or branch on top of the bulging earth. Sometimes it would ripple. Some fascinating and frightening alien seemed to simmer just below the surface, just out of view. Danger can be very enticing.
I don't remember what happened to the rising mound. Was the tank replaced? I have no idea, but I do know that I never walked over that spot and never had to face that certain and horrible death by sewage. Well, at least not literally. Psychologically, I'm convinced that I've experienced several "deaths by sewage."
In writing this, I have learned that sewage may play just as important a role, if not a more important role, in my life than shimmering. While I do believe that a little shimmering in life is a good and healthy thing, maybe, just maybe, learning to deal well with sewage is more important.
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