When my house was built in the early 1980s, it was common practice to take the construction debris and bury it in the yard.  30 years later, you can drive through any neighborhood from that era and see bulldozer-bucket-sized divots in most yards.  They’ve since made such a practice illegal for a number of reasons, but mostly because it’s lazy.  And bad form.

At my house, they buried the junk right behind the house and poured a concrete patio over it.  Buried and covered up.  Double whammy.  30 years later the second story deck which is secured in the same concrete patio is falling, quite literally, off of the house.  I spent several months in denial, but the problem got worse.  They usually do.

I hired a crew to come out and bring their big tools and liability insurance to fix the foundation of my deck without having it fall off the house.  After weeks, they finally appeared and got to work. While I don’t understand how they did it, I know it worked.  These guys were the type of guys I want fixing my stuff: ruddy and pragmatic.  They came in a pair; a regular Mutt and Jeff.   We’ll call the first one Jeff.  He was the foreman I was told. He was a wiry man, visibly shaking from too many (or not enough) Red Bulls.  Jeff took his shoes off when he came in to my house and asked the crew to put their cigarette butts in the garbage can rather than my bushes.  Thoughtful.  His buddy, Mutt, was the shorter, stockier, hairier of the two.  He was the quiet type and couldn’t be bothered with clients — that’s what Jeff was for.  Mutt operated the digger-machine-thing.  While not as vocal, he was likely the smarter of the two.  He didn’t say much. The steady stream of Newports took priority.

The fix was 15x - 20x more expensive than what it would have cost to do it correctly the first time.  Tragic.

In order to get underneath the slab, they had to dig down several feet.  They created two piles of dirt from their excavation.  While I do not pretend to be a geologist, it was clear to see where the ‘real Georgia clay’ stopped and the trash pit began.  That dirt was lumpy and black.  The things we bury usually are.

In order to level out the slab, they had to drill a hole in the concrete and shoot some goo underneath it to raise it up and level it off.  It’s quite technical they tell me.

In the process of drilling into one portion of the slab, they created a crack.   When I brought it to their attention, they reminded me that the process of fixing is messy and sometimes things get broken.  They did their best to repair it.

After they got the goo poured in and everything solidified, I noticed a different crack right where the trash pit had been.  I asked Jeff about it.

Mutt jumped in, “the crack’s always been there, hidden.  We just exposed what was already there when we fixed it."  My jaw dropped.  'He speaks,’  I thought.

"Can you fix it?" I asked, afraid he’d hit his word quota for the day.

"I can.  But you don’t want me to do that.”

“Right, yep, got it. Of course...But just so I can explain your thinking to the kids, what should I tell them,” I fumbled, feeling entirely inadequate.

"Gotta make it worse to make it better. Gonna hafta scrape it out to give the sealant sumpin' to hold on to.  Messy stuff,”  he said as his voice trailed off and he fumbled for another Newport.

Then I realized he was still talking about the concrete.  His wisdom ran as deep as my new foundation pilings.  I thought he was talking about our hearts, about the human condition, about our souls and the search for healing.  He was talking about my patio.

The metaphors were immediate and obvious to me: this is the work of healing. When we bury our stuff either by hiding it or by ignoring it, it rots and eventually the foundation will crumble. Sure, doing it right the first time would have been costly, but not nearly as costly as the repair.

Healing too, hurts.  Like a surgeon removing a tumor, healing often requires pain, exposing cracks, exorcising the past.  Like my patio, our hearts carry scars and are sometimes are never 100% level again.  As Mutt reminded me, there’s wisdom in scars.

It’s messy stuff.