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Cleaning Ditches (yes, it's just like it sounds)

The ditches need cleaning. Most of them. March is running out. Warm, dry days like these are hard to come by in the early spring of Southern Colorado.

Some folks think we should swap out our open ditches for enclosed 10-inch piping. With clean-out valves. If you saw how much the sediment builds up year by year, though, you'd understand why we think that sounds like a terrible idea. Maybe the smooth inside surface of the pipe would let the silt just sweep along. Maybe it'd only build up at joints and junctions. Maybe the pipes wouldn't slowly sink into the ground and disappear. Maybe they'd last just long enough to be someone else's problem.

Unless we spend the next 50 years here. 

We're pretty slow to move, so it could happen. Of course, if we're digging the ditches out freshly every year, hah, we won't last 50 years. Picture me, 89 years old, shovel in hand and wheelbarrow by my side. 

And 50 years of sediment from the ditches deposited upon the back property? Might just be enough to cover all the radioactive particulate matter left over from when the power plant was active across the river.

Once we get the ditches cleaned, I can work on all the saplings trying to turn this property into an urban forest. Every fenceline, every side of the garage, every piece of empty soil that hasn't been mown in a regular cadence, all conspiring to tear down my visions of order and return this land to the wild state it surely began in. 

Thinking about the history of this place, over the hundreds, thousands, and millions of years it's been here, I kind of hope it succeeds.

My neighbors will surely appreciate my enlightened perspective.

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