I’ve been a little quiet the last couple of days. My dad passed away on Friday.

I sat down more than once to write, stared at a blinking cursor, and realized I didn’t have anything funny to say. That’s unusual for me, normally I can find humor in almost anything, but grief has a way of making even the funniest person forget where the punchline is.

So if you’ve been wondering where I’ve been, that’s where.

But then life did what life always does around here: it handed me material.

For the last two or three years we’ve had one weird spot beside our pool that stays soft. Before you jump to “pool leak,” let me paint the picture. We live on clay soil, and our backyard backs up to a flood plain. When Texas decides to rain, it doesn’t drizzle politely…it tries to recreate Noah’s Ark. Water rushes between the ponds behind our house, sometimes right over the walking trail. Roads close. The ground stays wet for days. Add rubber playground mulch, shade from the pool, an eight-foot fence, and the house itself, and you’ve basically built the world’s largest sponge.

Years ago we even had the pool checked. Verdict: a microscopic leak around the skimmer, so small it was basically considered normal. The pool doesn’t lose water, not enough to notice beyond kids splashing half of it onto each other and the Texas sun stealing a little every day. Case closed. Or so I thought.

Recently we replaced our giant trampoline with a slightly smaller pink one, because apparently I have daughters and our backyard now operates under Barbie zoning regulations. Kris was convinced the old trampoline had been trapping moisture, and once it was gone, the ground would finally dry out.

It didn’t. Mother Nature, it turns out, was not aware she’d been given a deadline.

So my sweet husband reached the only logical conclusion: “There has to be a leak.”

Now, I should point out this man fixes irrigation for a living. When he says “I think there’s a leak,” it carries more weight than when I say it. Unfortunately, this time his evidence consisted entirely of damp dirt. So he started digging. And digging. Then digging some more. What started as a little hole became a bigger hole, which somehow became a full archaeological excavation. By the end of the day there was a trench beside my pool roughly thirty inches deep.

I’m standing there watching my children’s playground disappear into the earth while my husband hunts for what can only be described as an imaginary drip. Meanwhile I’m giving what can only be described as an unsolicited TED Talk.

“What if it’s groundwater?”

“What about the flood plain?”

“Clay holds water.”

“The pump isn’t even running.”

“The pool isn’t losing water.”

“What if it’s just… science?”

None of this helped. I was becoming increasingly aware that I was annoying the absolute life out of him. He kept digging. I kept narrating. Eventually I said, “Fine. Let’s test your theory.” We shut the pool pump off for twenty-four hours, surely if the plumbing was leaking underground, everything would dry up.

It didn’t. Not even a little. The water stayed exactly where it was.

Kris wasn’t convinced. So instead of stopping, he dug another hole, because clearly the first giant hole hadn’t asked enough questions.

Here’s the part that actually fascinated me: the water didn’t seep in from one direction like you’d expect from a pipe leak. It slowly appeared from every direction at once, the whole hole filling evenly. To me, that looked exactly like groundwater pushing through saturated clay. To Kris, it was simply a leak that hadn’t confessed yet.

He dug after working outside all day. In July. In Texas. Because apparently heat exhaustion wasn’t enough he wanted to argue with geology too.

Eventually he stopped. Whether he decided I was right, or decided the leak was so tiny we’d deal with it when it actually became a problem, I’ll probably never know. He filled in what he could, came inside, and we had dinner.

Later that night, something occurred to me: maybe neither of us actually cared about the leak.

I’ve spent the last few days reading four or five books and finishing seven puzzles. Not because I suddenly became a puzzle enthusiast but because puzzles have answers. Books have endings. They make sense.

Kris spent those same days digging giant holes, looking for a problem he could actually solve. Because leaks can be fixed.

Grief can’t.

Maybe that backyard was never about groundwater. Maybe it was about needing something, anything, that felt repairable.

Grief is strange like that. Sometimes it looks like crying. Sometimes it looks like silence. Sometimes it looks like reading five books in four days.

And sometimes it looks like a grown man declaring war on perfectly innocent dirt.

We still don’t know if there’s a leak. What we do know is that my backyard now resembles an active archaeological dig.

So if anyone happens to find dinosaur bones while looking for Barbie shoes please let me know.