Cleaning Up The Dirt

By ANNIE C. LEAVITT

We have a dip in the road that we pass through on the way to our house going south on State Highway 169 from downtown Overton. This dip, just south of the Robbins Nest Trailer village, is a flood wash; much like many other washes in our valley. Washes are important during the 1% of year when it rains.

When this wash floods, it carries a lot of sediment and mud that settles right in the middle of the highway. No problem right? The Nevada Department of Transportation (NDOT) crews come and cleans it up so we can cross the wash and get on our merry way.

The problem is that over the last few years NDOT has just been pushing the sediment over to the side of the road. We now have little mountains which have grown up in the wash.

What’s the big deal? If you didn’t live in our part of Overton, you might think those little hills were natural mounds of beautiful mother earth and not man-made piles blocking the natural ebb and flow of an important flood wash. But now the wash has been narrowed enough by these man-made hills that it floods even with the smallest amount of rain.

I contacted NDOT to let them know this could be a big problem. It was no small task for me to send an email like that. But when this wash floods we south-dwelling Overton residents can get stuck on our side of the road for hours.

Of course if it’s an unwelcome social event that I want out of, it provides the perfect excuse! “Sorry, the wash is flooded.” But when it’s work or a soccer game that I have to get to – well it just stinks! Hence, the sending of the email request for clean-up.

The official statement back from NDOT customer service was, “they are aware of this area but priority is our main arteries with the highest traffic volume.” Ugh. Another hit for rural Clark County.

This answer did, however, help me think of my own piles of dirt in my life. Most of us focus on the “main arteries” in our lives — health, wealth, relationships — because those are where most of our mental traffic goes. But what about the other piles, the ones you don’t often see because you don’t pass by them every day or the piles you pushed aside?

It may not matter now whether they have been cleaned up, but those small arteries, like letting go, forgiveness, or small self-sabotaging behaviors are the ones that matter when storms hit. If I simply push them out of the way instead of resolving them, all of those old feelings and negative habits hurt me. And when the next storm hits, the mud level and mess are going to be higher because I’m not only dealing with last storm’s dirt but this new storm’s dirt as well.

We all know what happens when we don’t clean out old hurts; they pile up. And then every small hiccup in life can cause a flood of negative emotions.

So, maybe NDOT will never clean up our wash. Maybe they’ll just keep letting people get stuck on both sides of the wash every time a trickle of rain falls. I have no control over that.

But what about my own life? I can clean up old hurts, I can forgive myself for past mistakes, I can get rid of old habits that aren’t helping me. I can dig them up and discard them from my life. No more pushing stuff aside and pretending they are just part of the scenery.

Just take a drive past Robbin’s Nest to the dip and you’ll see the mounds. It all eventually piles up and it is obvious to everyone.

Annie Curtis Leavitt has been published on designmom.com and is a former blogger for whattoexpect.com. She lives with her husband, four children, two cats, and a paranoid dog in Overton, Nevada.