On a damp day last week, I spent seven hours digging a hole.It...

On a damp day last week, I spent seven hours digging a hole.
It was, at the end, eighteen inches wide and four feet down to get below the
frost line so ice won’t pitch the posts of the porch we’re building on the back
of a house on a hill. Typically, it would be a morning’s work, if that. But
there were roots and rocks and the earth was clay, hard-packed, and stubborn.

And I had stayed up late the night before, was blurred
around the edges, feeling calm, dismantled. A hole, for my fuzzed and reeling
head, was the best I could hope for – away from the screams and sharp spinning blades of the
saws. So simple: here is the earth, make some of it go away.

“Nice hole,” one of the demo guys winked at me as he filled
up the doorway before returning to his louder, dirtier work inside chipping
away at a chimney that was being removed from the house in a process like
closing up a throat. I smiled, blushed, he laughed and wiped soot across his
forehead and thumped back to the bricks.

Four feet is a surprising depth, when you stand over the
hole and look down into the earth. It makes you think of:

Treasure
Tunnels
Creatures that burrow
Creatures that see in the dark
Escaping
Darkness
Water
China
Graves
Opening
Opening
Opening