Why Water Sits on Top of the Ground Here Instead of Soaking In
The first time I noticed it properly, I had been standing in the same spot for about ten minutes wondering what was wrong with me. It had rained the day before. Not much, maybe half an hour of it, the kind of afternoon storm that shows up in August and leaves before you have finished bringing things in off the porch. And the next morning there was still a puddle in the corner of the yard. An actual puddle, in a place that gets somewhere between seven and eight inches of rain in an entire year. I remember thinking the drainage must be broken somehow, which tells you how little I knew. There was nothing to break. Nobody had installed anything. The yard was just dirt and some struggling grass, and the water was sitting on it like it had been poured into a dish. What was actually under there I found out a few weeks later when I tried to plant a tree. I got maybe fourteen inches down with a shovel and hit something that stopped the blade cold. My first thought was a rock. So I moved ov...