No, literally. A literal ton. Six tons, actually, if we’re being exact.
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You may recall that I recently bought a house. This is very exciting news! But with a house comes a yard, and that means the yard must be taken care of.
I’ve written before about how I’m lazy by nature and, while I want to win a Pride Eye Award for my beautiful yard, I don’t know if that’s in the cards. It’s fun to dream of crisp grass and a flourishing garden, but I’ll be hard-pressed to actually pull it off.
However! That certainly doesn’t mean I’m not going to try. I want a beautiful yard, so I decided this weekend I’d put the work in. I called up a local garden store and put in my order for six tons of rock.
That may seem excessive. It certainly sounded excessive, even to me, when I explained what I wanted to do, had a few family members survey my yard, and was given a “you’ll probably need about six tons” estimate.
But I’m nothing if not a good listener. I dutifully arranged for six tons of rock to be delivered to my driveway and hoped that I wasn’t going to be left with a ton of pebbles.
On Saturday morning, the truck came by and, as promised, dropped six tons of landscaping rock onto my driveway. I stared at the pile. It looked like a lot but simultaneously not like six tons. I can do this, I thought. This’ll be doable. Not easy, but doable.
The challenges started right away. I’m not particularly muscular. As I started shoveling rock into a wheelbarrow, my arms protested. I don’t work out enough for this. But I had something to prove to myself and my rock-shoveling buddy, who was slinging rock back like it weighed nothing. I had to keep up.
And, Riverbend, I’m happy to report that I did keep up. We shoveled in the driveway and then wheelbarrowed the rock around to the backyard and out by where we had built a firepit.
We could manage about ten scoops of rock in the wheelbarrow, or else it was too heavy for us to balance it around to the back. So we shoveled ten scoops, wheelbarrowed it to the backyard, dumped the rock, spread the rock, and then repeated the process literally hundreds of times.
Spreading the rock was the most fun, because it was a little break on my joints and muscles. I knelt with my knees in the gravel (ow) and pushed the rock out with my hands to spread it around the firepit. Crawling around the firepit and kicking and pushing rock was actually more effective than using the rake, but it did make for a few moments where I laughed out loud at the absurdity — and got a few curious looks from my neighbors.
And so we did this for literally two days.
That was my weekend. We filled up the firepit in my backyard and then rocked this tree area where we hung up a hammock. The six-ton pile started to shrink.
Today, the Monday after all my rockin’ and rollin’, I’m a little sore. Not as bad as it could be, luckily, but I’m calloused, with muscles that I didn’t know I had aching. My lower back hurts from the shoveling and the wheelbarrowing and the “lift with your knees!” advice that I didn’t understand how to execute. My wrists hurt from lifting and flicking the shovel. Isn’t that wild? But it’s the truth.
The yard, however, looks amazing, if I do say so myself. Worth it.
And doubly worth it was the way the neighbors stopped to compliment us as we scraped the last few pebbles from the tarp. They were impressed we had managed all of it in one weekend, just my rock buddy and I, two girls handling six tons of rock by ourselves.
I was impressed, too. In fact, I was a little giddy as we smoothed out the last few wheelbarrows of rock, or maybe I was just delirious. Either way, I was happy, mostly because all my landscaping projects are done for a while.
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