When the Homily is about Immunology

Mother Dirt

The dried mud covering my shoes this morning are a testimony to what my weekend entailed...I suppose my wife was right when she suggested I should have put on my rubber boots for the task of refilling the septic feasibility holes, but oh well...the viruses won't care.

Another beautiful weekend, and since it may well have been the last of such weekends for a while, I decided I'd better get those holes refilled - especially since two of them would likely be in the midst of a future goat pasture. Filling them was markedly more difficult than digging them: what took a large backhoe three or four scoops took me a couple of hours worth of shoveling - even with my kids' help (or hindrance as the case may be.)

Nicholas asked me if it hurt the earth when they dug the holes and if we were making the earth feel better by refilling them. As I tried to answer, it also occurred to me: why is it that typically the people who have a hard time with the masculine pronoun being ascribed to God, seemingly have no problem with the feminine one being applied to the earth? I mean what about all those poor people who have a negative association with mothers? How are they to relate to dirt? Well, my craziness doesn't stop there, as I wearily worked on the third hole, it occurred to me that the only thing worse than manually filling graves is actually being in one.

As I became intimately acquainted with the soil, my wife was working on the chicken coop. Chickens will be our first farm animals to come home to roost. The coop, which existed already for some other purpose, needed to have some windows boarded up and some shelving removed. It also needed to have a door put into what had been simply an open doorway. In the workshop/storage shed/barn, the previous owners had left a small collection of what appears to be antique doors. Sue was rifling through them and noticed that some had price tags. And one of the doors also had a little sign attached that said something like this: "Teddy Roosevelt walked through these doors seven times." Now that's different...but of course, I don't believe it, because Teddy - as far as I know - had no teleportation skills and thus more likely walked through the doorway that these doors hung in. I wonder if we should not ebay them.

I did not go to church on Sunday, but that's okay because I didn't play five card poker on Saturday night either. (A beer to whoever can reference that line). Our niece and nephew spent the weekend with us and when we awoke on Sunday morning we came to the realization that having the six of them all together there would have been a disaster. They seem to be an unstoppable chain reaction of hyper activity whenever they are together (such that Iran would LOVE to study them) and every scenario that we imagined seem to go poorly when we gave it any amount of rational thought. So I stayed home with some of the kids and endured their non stop requests to play the visiting XBOX while I insisted they go out and enjoy the fleeting nice weather. I won, especially - believe it or not - when it involved shoveling dirt.

We officially saw our first wildlife last night too. While there has been evidence of their existence (which of course was never in doubt since we border 700 acres of undeveloped forest and wetland), but we'd yet to actually see them. Anyway a Raccoon was hanging out off the back porch eating an apple - cute little guy...but they can be problematic for chickens. A clear reminder to make sure the coop is very secure...I can think of no finer and worthier use for the former president's doors - assuming we don't ebay them.

The boat is docked, the noisy madness awaits.