The Grass is Always Greener

I’ve been complaining about how dry my property is. Actually, part of the lawn is lush:

The back yard this morning. Note the cloudy sky. Yippee!

Do you know why part of it is greener than the rest? Here’s a hint: Remember when Irma Bombeck said that the grass is always greener over the septic tank? Well, she wasn’t quite right. The grass is really greener over the septic tank’s drainfield.

If you live in rural America, you most likely have a septic tank (unless you have an outhouse). Eventually, it’ll need cleaning. We had ours cleaned about five years ago, but the septic cleaner guy said it could have gone another decade. Better safe than sorry, though. I’ve heard horror stories from people who woke up one morning to discover brown ooze seeping up through their grass. Soon they found that oil hadn’t been discovered on their property.

You’d think cleaning the tank would be one of the more odious—or is that odiferous?—jobs a person could have. In reality, it isn’t bad at all: open the cover, drop in a hose, suck up the crud, collect a check. Granted, I don’t know what happens after the truck leaves, but that’s another story.

Looking into our tank was fascinating. A lot of itsy bitsy insects live down there. A good thing, the guy said. The bugs are supposed to indicate a healthy septic tank. What the bugs do, I have no clue. How they reproduce is even more of a mystery. Do they grope around blindly until they get lucky?

The inside of the septic tank—at least what I could see of it—looked exactly the way I’d always pictured the underworld. Well, I never pictured the underworld with millions of little bugs, but if you ever studied mythology, you know what I mean. The liquid in the bottom looked like the River Styx. Where was Cerberus? Was Orpheus on his way out? Was Eurydice behind him, or had she looked back already? Was Persephone lurking around the corner?

Anyone who ever majored in English should find a septic tank’s interior a thing of beauty and a joy forever.