Pool building day has arrived! A couple of pickup trucks
disgorged a small army of guys into our side yard. David the pool salesman was
leading the charge. First thing he did was tell me that the brick walkway
leading to my garbage cans in my side yard needed to be taken up because the
excavator would destroy it. I was horrified. The walkway had only been built a
couple months earlier and I loved it. The thing was pretty and it kept my feet
from getting soaked when I was taking out the garbage. After the walkway went
in, not a day went by that I didn't ask myself why it had taken so long to do
this amazing, sensible, convenient thing. Now David was telling me it had to
go? Not on my watch!
"So you're going to remove the walkway, but you'll put
it back when you're done, right?" I asked.
"Yeah, we'll put it back," David assured me.
"You'll put it back the way it is?" I pressed,
just to make sure he realized how serious I was about my beloved walkway.
"We'll put it back, but this isn't really the sort of
thing we do."
I nodded. The assurance that it would be put back was
probably the best I was going to get. Demanding that it would be as good as new
might be setting the bar too high.
So David's small army started prying up my bricks as I took
photos and sent angry texts to my husband at work about how upset I was about
the loss – albeit temporary – of my beautiful walkway.
Probably to distract me and get me out of the way of his
workers, David led me to the backyard. He pointed to a large flowering bush in
the middle of the spot where the pool was about to go. I don't know what kind
of bush it is. All these Southern bushes blend together in my mind. It might be
a magnolia or a camellia or a gardenia. Or maybe a creeping myrtle. Is that a
thing?
"What do you want to do with that?" he asked.
"Glad you asked. I've been trying to get someone to
move it, and it's too big for my husband and me to move on our own."
"When we get the excavator back here, we can scoop it
up and put it somewhere else. How about over there?" David indicated an
open area on the other side of the yard.
"Yes! That would be perfect! It's just what I
wanted!" Suddenly I wasn't quite so upset about the (temporary) loss of
the walkway. My foliage would be saved!
Back out in front, the excavator had arrived. It was huge!
There was no way that thing could get into my backyard, was there?
David came to find me again.
"As I discussed with your husband, we're going to try
to get the excavator into the backyard without removing the gate, but we might
not have a choice," he said.
"If you have to take the gate down, you'll put it up
again, right?" I asked. If you couldn't tell before, I really don't care
much about pools. I don’t like being wet or cold or wearing bathing suits, so
there's not much in it for me. However, this always been my husband's dream,
and I was totally in support of getting him his midlife crisis pool. Heck, if
for no other reason, someday I might decide to have a midlife crisis of my own,
and this would make it harder for him to stand in the way of me getting a
midlife crisis horse or pickup truck or 3 karat diamond.
No, what I cared about was minimizing destruction and
inconvenience in our lives. If stuff was going to be removed or dismantled, I
wanted it put back. If stuff had to be destroyed, like the lovely grass in the
soon-to-be-pool area, then I wanted enough money left over after this ordeal to
fix it.
"Yes, we'll put it back up," David said.
So while David and I sat on the back patio going through
paperwork, his small army removed the gate and ushered a colossal piece of technology into the backyard. I couldn't watch. It had been hard
enough to witness my walkway reduced to a pile of bricks.
Watching the massive excavator emerge around the narrow side
of the house into the backyard was like watching my driveway give birth. You understand
that this same event has occurred thousands of times before at other people's
houses, but watching it happen to yours leaves you convinced there's no way something
this big is going to fit. What if my house needed a C-section?
When the excavator was safely delivered into my backyard, the
first thing it did was scoop a bucketful of dirt out of the other side of the grass
from where the pool was going. Then it rolled over to the spot that was
about to become a pool. It scooped up the bush along with its seven-foot root
ball, carried it over to the newly dug hole and tipped it in. The bush landed
with its root ball down, and its leaves up, just like it should have. How the
excavator driver did that is beyond me, but as my husband said when I showed
him the video, that driver is a great man.
Next time: The deep, deep, deep hole.
