Beach Pebble Blues

Ms. Rachow, a bona fide member of the Rock ’n’ Roll Generation, has been rolling rocks her whole life.

When my husband and I bought our current home, we inherited a landscape featuring a few tons of beach pebbles.
I soon discovered these handsome rocks were challenging to walk on, so they’re idiotic for paths. Weeds love to grow in them, so they’re rotten for groundcover. Leaves tend to stick to them and can’t be raked away, so they become an eyesore around the base of trees.
The only thing I could figure to do was scoop them up into pots. Sisyphus rolled his rock up the mountain for eternity. I picked up my pebbles. Over the next several years I collected many stones, 9,500 pounds worth. Now what the heck was I supposed to do with a pile of rocks the size of a rhino?
“Call the trash company,” my husband suggested.
“I can’t just throw away my rocks,” I said.
“Well, then, call a shrink, because you have a serious attachment disorder.”
Maybe he was right. But surely there was something good we could do with all those beautiful stones.
I googled “beach pebbles” to see what they were worth.
“Holy schmoly. If we were to buy these rocks today from a discount supplier with free delivery, the bill would come to over $5000.”
“Let’s use the money-back gun,” my helpful husband said.
“The what?”
He shaped his hand into a pistol, pointed at the rocks and went POW. “The pebbles are supposed to disappear, and be replaced by a stack of cash.”
At that very moment, I had a vision of what to do with the rocks. “Remember when I wanted a fish pond and you said it was too much maintenance? What if we made a pond of pebbles instead?”
His expression was priceless, and I could read his every thought:
1. My wife has rocks for brains.
2. Divorce is expensive, but maybe easier than digging a lakebed.
3. What great guys’ toy I can get away with buying to make up for cooperating with yet another harebrained scheme?
So what if he thought I was loco? The important question was how big a hole did we need for a million rocks. It was a reverse game of guess the number of jellybeans in the giant jar.
I staked out an oval that was approximately 20 by 30 feet, because it looked right.
“The lakebed needs to be 6 inches deep,” I said.
“How do you know that?” he asked.
“Calculus,” I lied.
I dug, and he hauled away tons of dirt and enough roots to make Alex Haley rise from the dead and make another mini-series.
I knew we were getting somewhere when a great blue heron flew over to check on what we were doing. The bird must’ve thought we were building a koi pond.
After digging our way through 11 weekends, the hole was done.
“Can we start putting in pebbles?” my husband asked.
“Sure, as soon as we clean the dirt off them.”
After several years of sitting, each bucket of rocks had acquired leaves and mud, a whole ecosystem that included plenty of spiders. How could we just dump the whole kit and caboodle into our “pond” without tidying the rocks up?
My spouse had that look on his face again. Even if he hadn’t spoken, I’d have known what he was thinking.
“You wash the rocks,” he said. “I’m going for a long hike in the mountains.”
The secret to a happy marriage is knowing when it’s time to say, “See you later.”
And so it was that I discovered a whole new meaning for stonewashed jeans. No matter that I got soaking wet and splattered with mud. No matter that I wore my fingernails down to nubs. No matter if eensy-weensy spiders climbed up my waterspout. I had the fun of doing something that absolutely no other human on the planet would be crazy enough to do.
Three more weekends later (and with quite a bit more help from the man who surely will be nominated for sainthood) we not only had a beautiful pebble pond, but we’d reclaimed the space where all those old buckets of rocks had been.
“Looks great,” he said.
“So what’s next?” I asked.
Out of his pocket came a full-page sale ad for the big screens. The TV he’d circled was the size of a rhino.
The secret to a long marriage is to know when it’s time to rock ’n’ roll and when it’s time to go with the flow.
First published in the Montecito Journal January 29, 2009