The BOTTOM Line

It begins: digging the hole

What really makes us one big human family? We come from different ethnic, economic, social, religious, and political backgrounds. Except for multiple identical siblings, we don’t look alike. Our voices, finger/footprints, irises are distinctive. We each react, respond, and feel differently. We know different stuff. We like/dislike different stuff. We each have our own pesky baggage. But I’ll tell you what makes us all the same: Shit, that’s what.

Almost deep enough

Pardon my potty-mouth (hehehe...I crack myself up), but Ray and I have just been on a week-long adventure stemming from this most basic—nay, elemental—activity. We just put in a new septic system.

For you urbanites who still believe your non-smelly poo-poo is carried away by the “magic river” to Perfectland, where it’s purified, crystalized, and eventually becomes the dew or the sparkle in newfallen snow, stop reading now. Who am I to burst your sanitized bubble?

The tank is in!

For the rest of us, a septic system is like a tiny, self-contained, home version of a city sewer system. I’ll spare you the goriest details, but let’s just say it was a week of de/construction—digging up most of our yard, tearing down a garden fence, plowing through two gardens, pulling out pasture fence rails, caving in and filling with dirt the old 500 gal non-functioning septic tank, dropping in a new 1500-gallon tank (thanks to a giant crane and a guy with a joystick, like he was playing a videogame), and digging in two new 65-foot lines of drainfield pipe—just so we can, as my grandson says, do our "doodie."

65' drain field trenches

Now that it’s almost done, we can honestly say that we have SEEN our humanity, and it isn’t pretty. And seeing close up (too, too close up) the stuff of which we’re made, we will now humbly OWN our humanity (in seven years when the loan’s paid off). We have a new, healthy (ahem) respect for the lengths humans will go just to…well…go.

This "road" used to be an antique wire fence and two gardens.

I try hard not to freak out or take to my bed over the major fence repair, re-seeding and re-gardening ahead. I try not to cry when I see the 40-year-old iris and daylilies shredded in the new dirt pile out back. And I offer the poem below by Maxine Kumin as a way to remind us all that the “bowels” of humanity (or at least poems about them) can also be beautiful:

This sandlot used to be my back yard.

The Excrement Poem

It is done by us all, as God disposes, from
the least cast of worm to what must have been
in the case of the brontosaur, say, spoor
of considerable heft, something awesome.

We eat, we evacuate, survivors that we are.
I think these things each morning with shovel
and rake, drawing the risen brown buns
toward me, fresh from the horse oven, as it were,

or culling the alfalfa-green ones, expelled
in a state of ooze, through the sawdust bed
to take a serviceable form, as putty does,
so as to lift out entire from the stall.

And wheeling to it, storming up the slope,
I think of the angle of repose the manure
pile assumes, how sparrows come to pick
the redelivered grain, how inky-cap

coprinous mushrooms spring up in a downpour.
I think of what drops from us and must then
be moved to make way for the next and next.
However much we stain the world, spatter

it with our leavings, make stenches, defile
the great formal oceans with what leaks down,
trundling off today’s last barrowful,
I honor shit for saying: We go on.