The ride home was silent. We were learning to balance a teeter-totter of emotions. On one side there was the huge feeling of accomplishment to see the house rising out of the ground; on the other side was the sense of enormous scale that left us feeling like we were fighting an impossible battle. Then, of course, there was the fact that we all felt like a bully had tossed us off the teeter-totter and stomped on us for three or four hours. Everything hurt. It was impossible to distinguish muscles from joints. We were one big ache, and somewhere at the back of our minds a dim voice reminded us it would feel even worse in the morning.
Building an entire house in nine months had never looked more impossible.
Later that week the bank inspector stopped by and said the same. Naturally I spouted all sorts of optimism about our skill and determination, even though we had never been skilled and our determination was failing as the days and weeks passed.
We connected four long hoses to stretch from Timothy’s pump house to our backyard, but the water pressure was low enough to make it barely worth the trouble. We left the hose in a bucket for a trickle-fill while we continued hauling one pailful after another up by hand from the pond. After we got moving, the hose would cut our trips by almost half, and that was worth it. We had moved into February by the time the blocks were all set, some with Pete’s help and some on our own. I paid him by the hour, and by the time the Donna Fill was delivered to fill the entire space we had created with the blocks, I realized I could have hired a crew to set the blocks in two days for about the same price I had paid for us to labor over it for more than a month. Telling myself it was a solid, character-building experience didn’t make me feel much better.
According to my careful schedule, we were supposed to have the entire house framed already. Instead, we stared in awe at a pyramid-size mountain of Donna Fill—which is a by-product of crushing granite. The gray powder is finer than sand but not quite as fine as talcum powder. We had twenty-seven dump truck loads of the stuff. Jimmy said it was the small dump truck, not the big one, but there was no such thing in my book. A dump truck was a dump truck, and our mountain was sized extra-large. Our block foundation was like an empty pit, and we had to fill it all the way to the top with the Donna Fill powder and pack it down tight before we poured the concrete slab floor on top of it.
We named our powdery mountain the slush pile and tackled it one shovelful at a time. It seemed impossible that we could move that much dirt in a lifetime, but it turned out to be impressive how much a determined woman could move in sixteen hours of lift-and-toss action.
Roman was in heaven. He settled into a corner with a bucket of rocks that Hope and Jada had painted to look like cars. They were nothing elaborate, but when they were lost in the mud we could paint replicas rather than worry about a hundred dollars’ worth of Matchbox cars fossilizing in our foundation. When we got too close with our shovels, he shooed us away. “This is my Donna Fill,” he said, drawing a line around his elaborate roads, holes, and hills. He was one of the only two-year-olds on the planet who not only had Donna Fill in their vocabulary but also had a working knowledge of its potential in sandcastle construction and tunnel stability, and its tendency to swallow painted-rock cars.
To the rest of us, it was the gray curse of the sandman from hell. We had Donna Fill in places it should never have gone. Our cars and house were coated with it. It got in our hair and our eyes, and I even found a handful in the bottom of my purse when I searched for a mint in the grocery-store checkout line.
It took us just over a week to fill in the basement-like space inside our block walls, so we were walking near the top block, where our slab would be poured. In the back corner of the house we were about eighteen inches off the ground, but in the front we were more like eight feet up. We weren’t ready for the slab yet, though; first we had to pack the Donna Fill tight and run the sewer lines.
I rented a walk-behind Wacker packer and let it drag me around the surface. The device looked a little like an oversize push lawn mower, but weighed two hundred pounds and had a smooth plate across the entire vibrating bottom to pack the Donna Fill down tight.
The kids hauled loads of Donna Fill in after me to fill any voids created by the compression. We pulled strings tight across the surface to find uneven places that needed a shovelful added or taken away. More packing, more shifting powdery granite from one spot to another, and then even more packing until it looked as smooth as the roller rinks of my childhood. Couples’ skate, everyone!
We finally finished the trench from the street to bury the water line up to the house and glued a vertical line of pipe together with a spigot on the end. The idea of having fresh drinking water on site made us all ecstatic, so it was with much fanfare that I attached a hose and turned it on. Then with less fanfare I ran to the street and turned the valve I had forgotten to open that would allow water up the pipe. When I gave it a second try, pointing the nozzle at a tree and whispering a mixture of curses and prayers, Roman clapped with delight. “Momma’s peeing on the tree!” he shouted. Then he froze, eyes wide, hands tugging at his waistband, and feet hopping in the familiar I-gotta-go-now dance.
Drew shut the hose down while Roman took my place by the tree.
Pete hadn’t been around in a while, but I called him for help with the sewer lines. I was terrified to place them myself. If I measured wrong, our toilet would sit outside the bathroom, and the washing machine could end up in the hallway. Not only that, but the wrong angle on a pipe could funnel sewage in the wrong direction, namely, back into my house.
“Sewer lines’re easy,” Pete told me over the phone. “Only one rule to remember, shit flows downhill. You get that right, everything will work out.”
We muddled through with a little help from him and a lot of help from YouTube. He said he would stop by the day before my plumbing inspection to check things out.
Since I had to take half the day off work anyhow for the inspection, I scheduled a photography session that morning to get some new shots for my book promotions. I was up early getting my curls under control and trying to remember how to apply makeup. My mind was so clearly somewhere else that the photographer mentioned a faraway look in my eye like it was a bad thing. He was a trouper, but the final selection was filled with forced smiles and worry creases on the way to a migraine. I selected several almost at random, ran out of the studio and then back in twice before I had my purse, my phone, and the photo CD.