Two hours later, I was still pulling weeds from the cracks between the enormous slabs of slate sidewalk in front of my house, and essentially playing with water to try to make everything clean. This is what I do—I make way for other things. When stuff is in the way I like to unblock it. I can’t help it.

What was remarkable to me was that I had somehow entered “the zone” while caring for the front yard, which I thought was an impossibility. Gardening involves bending over a lot and my street is busy with traffic. Whenever I’m out there doing stuff, I feel like I’m on stage, with no big old oak tree to hide behind since it was chopped down last winter. The old trees across the street were chopped down some time ago too, judging by the stumps there, so our homes just look like big bald bright spots on a street otherwise very full with lovely trees.

Our stump makes me sad, in part because of that contrast. I feel like the ugly duckling on the block. It’s a bummer, but I’m not really doing anything about it yet.

In earlier bouts with water and making way for things, I have been known to invest an amount of time moving rocks and dirt around to help water flow or drain.

One day in early spring a year or two ago, River and I visited a stream in Springfield’s Forest Park that leads to a pond. It is in a lovely, quiet setting with a couple of paths nearby and places to sit and ponder the universe. When I saw how clogged the stream was with fallen branches and accumulated leaves from the previous autumn, I dove right into begin clearing it, straddling the water, bracing myself on the surrounding rocks, and reaching all around to collect what I could. The water was frigid but refreshing. I deeply enjoyed seeing how much faster it flowed when I opened a path.

More recently, we were visiting a park near our house for a quick stop at the playground for the kids. A pair of water fountains had the water running, but their basins were full, so that every time you went to take a drink, the water spilled out all over your feet with nowhere to drain. I noticed the basins had been filled with sand from a nearby sandbox. Someone had evidently done this on purpose. The drains were quite clogged but it seemed like something that could be undone, if a person put a little time into it. As I was attempting to remove the sand, my companions (adults and children alike) all stood waiting for me, watching, and I heard River trying to explain my activity. It was then I realized, with some embarrassment, what a pattern it is in my life, maybe just an extension of certain kinds of childhood play.

It helps me if it’s activity I can do with my own two hands. Our tree stump seems out of my reach somehow, although once it’s gone I will feel more like I can assess what the empty space could be. People give me suggestions for what to do about it, and I just sit on the ideas. I’m somehow not quite ready to clear this particular clog in the landscape. I don’t know why. Its time will come.

While I tend to look at the back yard more often these days, which is looking better and better now that we have the poison ivy relatively under control, it’s easy to forget about the front. There is more of a relentless, hot sun at this time of year in the front yard, and it has these neglected, blighted aspects that make me not want to look at it as much. And that makes me not want to dwell in it or soak it in. And in order to clear parts of it up, I need to sort of hang out in the space and get in that zone I mentioned. It’s a right-brained exercise—my favorite kind—where I just move around doing stuff and my mind lets go and two hours later the job is done, and I don’t even remember doing all of it.

I’ve been trying to encourage myself to care for the places that have the potential to look much nicer. Having a nicer house and yard than I used to, I’ve grown a little complacent about those places. I’ve gotten lazier about weeding. Well, then again, I’ve always been a little lazy about weeding, who am I kidding.

The biggest channel-clearing effort of the year, for us so far anyway, was the process of hiring contractors to dig up a bunch of our back yard and install PVC pipes underground along with two yard drains. The ultimate purpose of this work was to stem the flow of storm water and general runoff away from our basement and out to the street instead.

In a heavy rain, our basement door would turn into a sort of Niagara Falls-like scenic viewing spot. The sound of the falls was quite audible from anywhere in the house during such a time. If we weren’t joking about turning the basement into a hydro power factory with turbines capturing all that energy, we would have been crying, but then that would have just added to the unfortunate flow.

Aside from that problem—and the shoddy patch jobs people had done repeatedly on the basement floor to cope with the wet—the issue with all this water was that it also caused plenty of wood rot in several locations. The house is not well-ventilated, and that needs to be addressed at the roof as well as in the basement; not doing so can cause longer-term problems with moisture. Also, storms would cause the back yard to flood. After days of dryness, the yard would still be muddy, including at the top of the rather tall hill our yard becomes at the very back. Clearly something was very wrong; something was backed up, maybe in multiple places; this was conveyed to us after a home inspection and before we purchased. We knew what we were getting into, just not exactly what we would do to fix it.

The way people have typically coped with water flow in this part of the neighborhood, it seems, has been to allow it to come in through the basement, and make a way for it to pass on out again. Sort of like a house on stilts, I guess, except without the stilts or any particular design that enabled the flow. Water would just get stuck, and along with it would come plenty of sediment, which would pile up, and over a period of 20 years, you have a new normal as to where the ground is.

So much sediment piled up in the rear of our house that the foundation wall around the basement was no longer at grade. Instead it was below grade, with the sill just at grade. This is one reason why Niagara Falls would pour into our basement in a heavy storm. The water would pool at the back, and then just pour right over the top of the foundation wall, beneath door frames or windows, or over them, rotting them of course, and causing whatever other chaos water can cause when it has its way and no one has given proper thought to where it ought to go, really.

The front of our house seems to be sloped slightly uphill from the back, even while the back is also a steep hill. Sitting in our own little dale like this, naturally it’s going to be very wet unless we do something about it, so we did, or we have been, and we are still trying.

Early spring around here involved a lot of digging with machinery and tearing-up of some old dead bushes and wanna-be trees (hallelujah!). The drains and pipes went in and then we couldn’t wait to see what would happen in a heavy storm. As it turned out, the foundation wall still leaks like crazy but no more Niagara Falls. The water has somewhere to go. Namely, that is, through the pipes which now connect properly to the storm drain. The old clay pipes, which were probably about as old as the house (well over 100 years), were smashed and broken and useless underground. There had been some vain hope that we could connect to them and use them again but we were wisely advised to use PVC pipe instead and just start over.

Ideally, I would have loved to attach rain barrels to all of our gutter downspouts, but the flooding and wood rot really had to be addressed and that meant, for now, attaching ourselves to the storm drain to try to get things flowing again. The last thing we want is for our house to become a swamp once and for all.

Now we have new grass growing in the back yard, without the mud pit, where previously there had been a weird mechanism installed to try to get the water to flow elsewhere. Along the edge of the back deck, at the start of the back yard, there were some sickly juniper shrubs, which in turn were surrounded by a curving, sorry-looking miniature channel of gravely cement, done very much by hand and rather unfinished. This channel was apparently supposed to redirect water and get it to go to a big hole that had been dug next to a giant, gangly rhododendron by the driveway. If only the cement channel had actually reached the driveway it might have worked a little, but instead it just made any water it managed to collect (this being an area that would pool with water, and it didn’t flow much) directly into the ground underneath the deck, where there was a growing sinkhole.

No more of that. Just new grass, and no more sinkhole. Much better. Doing this without machinery would have been difficult indeed. A neighbor of ours told us as much, having tried to re-grade around their foundation; I was told that the soil here is so clay-like and heavy that it takes much longer to move earth than one might expect at first.

So my attentions on the sidewalk in front feel rather petty in comparison to some of the above. All the same, I end up fiddling around to see where the water flows and I wonder why it doesn’t make it to driveways on either side. Water on our sidewalk simply pools at the center, right about where the giant tree stump is located. Pulling weeds brought up some dirt, and trying to spray this off the sidewalk just made the muddy puddle I was standing in even bigger. So it took me a long time to examine the situation and try to work out the relationship between the water and the topography of the undulating sidewalk, like teeth or tectonic plates that have shifted a lot over the years and now overlap in unpredictable patterns. Water’s movement reveals secrets in all of that, if only I could remember what they are, having been in some zone for a while there.

Much more dramatic is the experience of standing on our front lawn and looking up at the house during a strong rain storm. Water pummels down over the gutters (which need to be cleaned) and into the yard on either side of the porch stairs. Over time, the force of this water pounding the earth has caused two almost symmetrical channels to be carved into the dirt, each reaching out diagonally to their respective sides, where the water can keep traveling, flowing on to driveways on either side of the house and then out to the street. It took us a while to realize these channels were there; that the unevenness in the yard has actually been caused by the way water has been behaving on our roof. At least there is no shortage of work to do—we won’t soon run out of channel-clearing projects for me. If we did, I don’t know what I would do with myself.