River Roots Redevelopment: Nothing But Mud

Selina Pedi-Smith,

Founder, Pellere Foundation

There’s nothing like renting a relatively expensive piece of outdoor equipment to have you watching the sky and mumbling to yourself like a soothsayer of old. Or desperately searching your memory for any recollection of a May quite so wet.

The weather is always contrary right when we need it not to be, of course. It just feels even more so when it’s very important to you that it Not be.

So, I’ve been learning to dig in mud.

Our driveway is mud. Our kitchen floor is mud. Our living room floor is mud. I’m even finding random little clods of mud upstairs. My life is one big ball of mud.

But through all the mud…progress!

Sort of.

See, within a couple days of firing up the digger, our skid loader decided to throw yet another fit. And this time, I couldn’t fix it. We needed to call in a Case mechanic for specialized servicing and specialized parts.

And…we’re still waiting on those parts.

Thankfully, we managed to borrow a smaller skid and move a significant chunk of the dirt we’ve been digging up, but we still have mountains waiting to be moved. Meanwhile, the rental clock keeps ticking.

So we keep digging what we can, creating a rather surreal landscape of multicolored clay mounds and the occasional impressively large rock.

It always seems to happen like that, doesn’t it?

You finally get moving on something, and then something else pops up to wreck your carefully crafted plans.

Sometimes, you can put on your little 20-20 hindsight glasses and admit that yes, you probably should have gotten around to giving the skid a thorough tune-up when the season ended.

And other times, well…you’re just standing there staring at the sky and wondering why THIS had to be the wettest month you can remember.

But there is progress, all things considered.

And honestly, I’m starting to feel like, in the event of a zombie apocalypse, I could probably jump into any random piece of heavy equipment and save the town. I assume these things all operate on roughly the same principles.

More importantly, though, I haven’t been alone out there.

Some days, my husband and I have taken turns on the borrowed skid while a dear friend of ours runs the digger. Other days, I run the digger while my husband works the skid.

And somewhere between the mud, the breakdowns, the waiting on parts, and the steadily growing piles of dirt…it’s started to feel less like one giant problem sitting on my shoulders.

It’s nice to know I’m not the only one responsible for all this mud.

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Rachel Brosnahan is the Community Engagement Coordinator for River Roots Redevelopment. Want to help us rethink what redevelopment can look like—together? Follow the conversation and share your thoughts with us on Facebook and LinkedIn, or reach out directly to rachel@riverrootsredevelopment.org. We’d love to hear from you!