Feb 25, 2020 3 min read

I may have mentioned a time or two about my yard. How it is so rare to have grass growing that my motto is, “If it’s green, it stays,” regarding weeds. How there is often far more weed eating than actual mowing that needs to be done in summer.

Once or twice, the mess came from construction equipment being moved around to work on the house. At least once, it was from sidewalk repairs. A couple of times, it came from repairing a water line or redeveloping our spring and cistern. It has always come from my husband working to improve our lives and/or our living conditions, so it’s hard to get mad at him. Although sometimes, I still do.

Last summer, it seemed that we had made it through that chapter of our lives. It had been a year and a half since my husband had needed to dig up our yard, and I began to believe there was a possibility that I could start thinking about creating flower beds and enjoying my yard.

I created two mulch beds last year before I found out that, in fact, we weren’t done digging. That realization came when the coal mine informed us that they expect to mine underneath of us in 2020.

And now we have been informed that they expect to be undermining within a month. That means relief ditches are being dug around my house, my garage, and my barn. The dirt must be trucked away from the sidewalks in order for us to be able to walk from the driveway to the house. Oh, and in the driveway? They found a spring by the garage that is flooding the driveway as we speak.

That also means that there are only a handful of blades of grass visible again. Between the actual piles of dirt and all the tracks in the yard from the equipment that is moving it, coupled with the holes that were dug for the beams that will be attached in various places to my foundations, my yard is a mess.

An absolute mess.

It will be that way for several months, until the mining is finished and the earth has had a chance to settle completely. I will spend that time trying to keep the dirt and mud out of my house and praying that, at the end of it all, I still have a house to try to keep clean.

At that time, all of it will need to be reversed, with the beams being removed and the ditches being refilled. The tracks will return when the dirt gets scraped back across the yard. Hopefully I will be able to plant grass seed this fall early enough to germinate before winter sets in, but the possibility exists that grass won’t be seen again until a year from now.

The only positives I can find in this situation is that I won’t have much mowing to do this summer again. And that I’ve got quite an area that I could plant vegetables. One thing is for sure: I could have one heck of a hill of potatoes.