Mud

Mud is one of nature's most contradictory inventions.  It's one of only several things that comes to mind that you can love and hate depending on what's going on in your life at the time.   Mud itself is pretty neutral, unless it happens to be located in the Big Sur area of California under a stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway.  If that's where it is, mud can be pretty malicious. 

All the mud that was there under the highway last week is now at the base of the cliff, with a bunch of asphalt mixed in, and if you listen really hard you'll hear it laughing at the folks who now must make a two hour long detour to avoid the mischief it caused.  I know for a fact the mud has been planning this particular road mayhem since the first drops of rain started falling a couple of weeks ago.  No way humans could have caused this mess - our highway engineers are way too smart to build a road where it can decide to take a swim one day.  Never happen.  

Mostly mud is some really tame stuff, and usually helps out when it can.  I remember the times when I was a child and I'd go out of my way to find a puddle of water with a bunch of dirt mixed in.  I'd make darn sure my little brother was really close to it and then jump right into the middle of the mess.  We'd both usually wind up wishing I hadn't done that, but I've never been able to stay clean for more than a few minutes.  Most of my shirt tail is always more outside my belt than inside it.  Sure, I make the attempt to be neat and clean, but for some folks that's really hard. 

College days were full of mud, we could always find a bunch of it to drive through in somebody's pickup.  One Halloween, a bunch of buddies and I loaded a pickup - I can't remember who's  -  full of unsold pumpkins from a local patch, and drove around town tossing them at other buddies cars.  They all started chasing us and we and wound up flipping the truck over into a muddy field.  There's nothing quite like a whole army of teen aged college kids running around an overturned pickup, slipping and sliding in the mud and tossing pumpkins at each other.   Even the cops were amused.  They tried not to chuckle while they told us to clean up the mess, but cops have their limits too, and one of them couldn't stand it.  He laughed so much he doubled over.  Not much we could clean up anyway.  Too much mud.

Also, while in college, there was a Freshman-Sophomore tug of war every year.  The mud puddle was between the teams and the losing side was pulled through it.  Of course the winners saw how much fun it was to be covered in mud and jumped in to the rescue.   That's how my nose got broken the first time.  One of the jumpers, wearing a size 48 combat boot, landed on it with enough force to make me miss a couple of classes.  Yeah, I know, any excuse is good for that. 

Some of my friends, in New Mexico, live in mud houses.  It's called "Adobe" there, and it's quite fashionable to live in them.  If the walls are really thick, it's called a "Double Adobe" and besides being chic, the mud acts like a heat sink and evens the hot daytime with the cooler night temperatures, and is an amazingly efficient energy free climate control system.

I tried to remember all these pleasurable mud experiences today as I carefully placed concrete pavers along one side of our house and under where we store the trash cans.  It didn't work.  Today's one of those days that I really hate mud.  If there were no mud I would not have had to save the trash cans from it and could have been doing something, ANYTHING, else except dinking around with heavy slabs of concrete.