Home & Garden

There will be no riding around Stoneybrook with the windows down, least not until the rains come to wash the stink away.

I knew what to expect, had already gotten the phone call preparing me for the worst. Probably so I wouldn't cry and cuss in public.

But I wasn't even to the top of the hill when that smell slapped me across the face harder than Jessica Craft walloped me for snapping her bra in sixth grade.

Sewage … raw, uncut, unfiltered and decades-old was festering in my backyard.

The real disconcerting part was that the gang of strangers with their dirty shovels and a truck like a Hoover vacuum had long since returned to parts unknown, leaving only the unmistakable aroma behind.

I had been absent from the carnage, but met the scout earlier that day when she came by to search for the tank. With a long, rusty metal bar, she stabbed through grass, mud and flowerbeds until she heard a THOOWAMP!

"It's right there," she said with a grin that would've been sweet had I not known what she was looking for. "It's not too deep, so they probably won't need the backhoe."

Huh? A back-what?

But by the time I arrived later that afternoon, there was only the smell, an eight-foot patch of recently churned red earth and the sorrowful face of My Lovely Wife.

In that instant, I knew how she would tell me that my favorite dog had died. Or worse … my garden was under siege by a scurrilous band of shovel-toting dirt pirates. Maybe I should start from the beginning.

I don't know much about home maintenance. I know even less about plumbing. Handing me a wrench is like giving Indiana Jones a pair of ballerina slippers. But even I know that a gurgling toilet and a shower caked with what looks suspiciously like poo is cause for alarm.

So the plumbers came. Plumbers plunged. Plumbers left. Plumbers cashed check. Poo returns. Plumbers say to call the septic tank people … news to us considering we didn't even know we had one.

So they came … they dug … they sucked it clean … whole neighborhood smelled like an outhouse after a Brunswick stew cook-off.

But before packing in their shovels and monster hose, they left my wife with a parting gift.

"You're gonna need to replace your field lines."

Translation: We're gonna bring a tractor through here, turn your yard into a mud-boggin' pit, uproot all your plants, ruin your life and accept a hefty payment in return.

Please don't forget to punch me in the face.

It would appear that it's imperative to dump septic tanks out every 10 years or so, else things get stopped up. What a joy to serve as a case in point.

But there's more than sewage that smells fishy around here. So you'd better believe I'll be getting a second, third and 14th opinion before so much as a single blade of grass gets trample.

The only hoe coming near my yard had better have a Lowe's sticker on it.