Fond (?) memories have been rushing back to me of the variety of stop-gap attempts that we have made over the years to have the aforementioned defunct septic last longer.

More than ten years ago we had a series of Tropical Storms and a weak, down-grading Hurricane  who came directly over us.  Lots and lots of wind and rain.  Rain———-the horizontal type.  It eventually found its way to the ground where it saturated everything and elevated the water level to above the ground.  I guess that’s called flooding.

Well in and around these storms, we had some tree-people come in to take down some huge dead limbs prior to the biggest, up-coming scheduled storm.  The tree-people did their thing, but they brought their tree-trucks across where our “distribution box” was established under the ground.  A big problem to an already pernicious, over-loaded drainage system.

Enter our wonderful, family-owned (second generation) septic company.  At that point our entire house was probably a health-code violation with a roof on it.  They dug, they pumped, and then they gave us the bad news.  The “distribution box” had been crushed by the tree-people……………What is a distribution box?????  AND it (said box) would be way over a thousand to replace, but one of the nice septic men, who said he would never admit that he told us, said that the actual box was about twenty bucks at Home Depot and that an idiot with a shovel could do it.  Well I figured I could be that idiot.  And that with some energetic digging that we (I) could do it myself.  Which I did…………….but first………….

You see at that point we did not have the memorial flagstone marking exactly where the septic tank was.  So first I had to dig (4′ 9″) to find the tank (and yes, I measured it), then I had to find where the drainage was for the distribution box which was off of the tank at a lower level (remember the whole gravity thing?).  I didn’t know where all of those things were exactly, so I started digging, and digging, and digging.  That general area in the front yard, right off of the front sidewalk started to look like an archaeological dig site.  I would dig a trough off in one direction to see if I ran into any PVC drainage pipes from the house where I could then follow them to the septic tank.  Then when that didn’t produce anything of worth, I would dig another trench off in another direction to see if I could hit “pay load” (ha!).  Finally I found the tank!  YIPPEE!  Then I had to dig all around it to the bottom to find where the drainage to the distribution box was…………yippee………..

I did ultimately find a silly-looking, relatively flimsy-looking, black plastic box, and it was crushed.  I then went to Home Depot and discovered in the gardening department (of all places?) a similar, less-crushed, black plastic box, and it was right around $20!  It had molded plastic “ports” off of the sides.  Apparently I was supposed to find where there were other tube thingies that would run off of our buried box out into our yard and thus becoming the leach-field.  I was learning way more than I ever wanted to know about septic systems and their working properties & philosophies.  And wait!  Surprise!  More digging was involved.

It took me a long time——–weeks probably.  I don’t remember.  I’ve blanked it all.  We would cover all of the trenches and major pits with plywood in between my digs and my resultant necessary physical collapses & dosages of NSAIDS.  We kept the horses out of the front yard, they would no doubt fall in.  And I didn’t want to consider having to winch them out.  And yes, there were three tube thingies that ran out from the old box.  I had to cut the well-positioned, pre-molded openings out of the new box to fit our front yard schematics (Someone really had thought out this whole distribution box manufacturing thing ahead of time!  Hats off to them.  I was impressed!).

So I dug and dug & sprinkled gravel where I was supposed to, and I connected our pre-existent leach-field thingies to the plastic box newly-cut hole-thingies.  And then I reverse dug (what is it called when you fill in a big hole?) all of the trenches and pits and archaeological dig sites———-and there were a lot of them!  And finally…………..FINALLY…………..that really, really bad smell went away with the freshly, reverse-dug & replaced dirt.  I threw away my gloves (they were nasty) and I bleached everything that would stand still, including me.

We were never turned in to the County for no permitting.  That could be because of the occluding line of cedar trees that I planted along the road many years ago (anti-establishment is my middle name———-no, it’s really just Ann).  I must’ve done an okay job.  We limped along septically-speaking for over ten more years.  But I don’t want to ever————EVER do that again.  My back x-rays and vertebral stenosis reflect that.

And now you can see why I’m setting off party poppers and throwing confetti at the installation of our own, new, wonderful septic system……………….with a lift station!!!!!!!!—————–Whoop!  Whoop!  Whoop!