The Berm — Bigger Than Me
A story about water, weeds, rocks, resilience, and discovering that sometimes the thing you're building is really building you.
START — BEFORE
Before there was a berm... there was this.
It started with water.
Not a little water.
Florida water.
The kind of rain that doesn’t politely fall from the sky and disappear. The kind that comes down hard and fast, finds every low spot in your yard, and makes you suddenly realize just how much you don’t know about drainage, elevation, soil and erosion.
And apparently, I had a problem.
Water from the common area behind the backyards was making its way toward my property. My home and carport sit at one of the lower points, so when enough rain comes, the water knows exactly where it wants to go.
Toward me.
I decided I needed a berm.
And this is where AI entered the story.
I had already started using AI to help me figure out water issues on both the right and left sides of my house. It was a completely new thing for me. I would describe what was happening, ask questions, talk through possible solutions and then go outside and see what was actually happening in my yard.
It became my sounding board.
And believe me, there were a few arguments and adjustments along the way—measurements, quantities, supply orders, how many bags of rock I actually needed, and the occasional “Are you freaking kidding me?” moment. 😂
AI and I didn’t always agree.
But we kept working through it.
I wasn’t blindly following instructions. I was learning, experimenting, observing and figuring things out as I went.
And eventually, that process led me to the berm.
Now, before this project, I knew what a berm was in theory.
I had no idea what a berm was going to mean to me.
I wasn’t interested in digging up my yard. I wasn’t going to excavate some enormous trench and turn my property into a construction site. I wanted to work with what I had.
So I started building upward.
Soil over the grass.
Weed paper.
Cardboard.
Packed earth.
Pavers.
Rocks.
Mulch.
More rocks.
And then came the rain.
And more rain.
And more learning.
I began watching water in a way I never had before.
Where does it come from?
Where does it want to go?
Where does it collect?
Where does it rush?
Where does it slow down?
Where does it erode?
I started paying attention to elevation, which is a funny thing to become obsessed with when you’re in your early sixties.
I started noticing that the front of the berm was lower and stayed wetter. I watched what happened to the pineapple area on the house side. I watched the rocks. I watched the soil.
And I learned that water has a mind of its own.
You can tell it where you want it to go.
But water has opinions.
Then came the physical work.
And that part was no joke.
There were days when I worked for hours moving soil, setting pavers, positioning rocks and trying to get everything where I thought it needed to go.
My body was not particularly impressed with my plans.
My back hurt.
Sometimes it hurt badly.
There was one night when the pain was so severe that I honestly thought I might have to call 911.
No lie.
And there were nights when I couldn’t sleep because I was thinking about the berm.
Would it hold?
Would the rain overwhelm it?
Was the elevation right?
Was the water going to go around it?
Was the soil going to move?
Was I making this better or making a bigger mess?
At times, the berm became a little traumatizing to my inner self.
I know that sounds dramatic.
But it isn’t.
Sometimes something physical becomes emotional because it represents something bigger than the physical thing itself.
And somewhere along the way, I realized that the berm reminded me of something from my childhood.
The potato muck.
I grew up around agriculture.
My family had apple orchards and cherry orchards. My Aunt and Uncle had a huge farm.
When I was four years old, my father was fatally injured in an automobile accident, and my mother spent months in a coma. During that time, the farm became a very important part of my world.
My Uncle became like a father to me. My Aunt was an important part of my childhood, too. Together, they gave me a place to belong—and my Aunt gave me twelve years of piano lessons. My cousins stepped in as well, making my brother and me part of the big “FARM LIFE” equation.
We weren’t just visiting the farm. We were part of it.
That farm gave me family, work, music and memories.
It also gave me the potato muck—and, let’s just say, a few traumatic memories.
And the WEEDS!
They were enormous.
At least they seemed enormous to my brother and me.
We would be out there pulling potato weeds, and I swear those things were bigger than we were.
It was traumatizing.
I hated those weeds.
And decades later, here I was in Florida, staring down weeds that seemed determined to survive underneath the sand, around the rocks, through everything I tried to do.
Apparently, some things really do follow you through life.
The difference was that this time I was the adult.
This time, I was the one deciding what to do.
And I wasn’t just fighting weeds.
I was trying to protect my home.
That made it different.
The berm also connected to something else that had quietly become important to me over the last year and a half: gardening and sustainable living.
I’ve become interested in propagating plants and growing vegetables from seed.
I’ve grown sweet peppers.
Bell peppers.
And then came my Scotch bonnets.
Four of them.
My four babies.
I grew them from seed and have absolutely spoiled them.
I have given those plants motherly care.
They are Jamaican, they are hot, and they have attitude.
Naturally, I love them.
And somewhere in all of this, the berm, the garden, the rocks, the soil and the plants began to feel connected.
I wasn’t simply trying to stop water.
I was learning how to work with my little piece of Florida.
I was learning about soil.
Water.
Plants.
Erosion.
Drainage.
Growth.
And patience.
Lots and lots of patience.
The funny thing is, I don’t think I realized how much this project was going to teach me about myself.
There were days I was completely consumed by it.
Then came one Thursday when I worked on the berm from eight in the morning until about four in the afternoon.
Eight hours.
I was exhausted.
I was sore.
I had been moving things around all day.
And yet, the berm was not going to take my life away from me.
I showered.
I got cute.
Well…
I think I got cute. 😂
And I went out with my girlfriends for Reggae Thursday.
Because Jamaica wasn’t going to wait.
And neither was I.
That night mattered to me.
Because the berm may have been taking my energy, but it wasn’t going to take my joy.
It wasn’t going to take my music.
It wasn’t going to take my friendships.
It wasn’t going to take Jamaica.
It wasn’t going to take my life.
That realization may have been more important than anything I did with the soil that day.
There will always be another project.
Another problem.
Another storm.
Another weed.
Another thing to figure out.
But there also needs to be reggae.
There need to be girlfriends.
There needs to be laughter.
There needs to be Jamaica.
There needs to be life.
And so I kept going.
I watched the rain.
I adjusted things.
I packed the soil.
I placed the pavers.
I worked with the rocks.
I watched what happened after the storms.
One particularly hard storm showed me just how much water was coming through. It wasn’t some tiny trickle. Water came over the front of the berm and into the berm itself.
That was a moment when I knew I still had work to do.
But I also knew something else.
The berm was working as a system I was still learning to understand.
And that was okay.
I didn’t need to get everything perfect on the first try.
I needed to learn.
Adjust.
Try again.
That might be one of the biggest lessons of the whole project.
Progress doesn’t always look like success while you’re in the middle of it.
Sometimes it looks like wet soil.
Sometimes it looks like rocks that have moved.
Sometimes it looks like standing in your yard after a storm trying to figure out what the hell just happened.
Sometimes it looks like being exhausted and wondering why you ever started.
Sometimes it looks like pain.
And sometimes it looks like getting in the shower after eight hours of hard work and going out to listen to reggae with your girlfriends.
Because life is not one project.
It is all of it.
The work.
The pain.
The frustration.
The music.
The laughter.
The people.
The plants.
The storms.
The rebuilding.
The joy.
I don’t know exactly when the berm stopped being just a berm.
Somewhere between the rainstorms, the mud, the rocks, the soil, the weeds, the aching back, the sleepless nights and the moments when I wondered what the hell I had gotten myself into, it became something much bigger.
It became a challenge I couldn’t walk away from.
Maybe that’s because I’ve been here before.
As a little girl, I worked on my uncle’s farm, pulling weeds from potato muck that seemed bigger than my brother and me.
Those weeds felt enormous.
The work felt endless.
And somewhere deep inside me, I think I remembered that feeling.
Only this time, I was the grown woman.
And this time, I could decide what happened next.
The berm tested me.
Physically.
Emotionally.
Mentally.
There were days when I hurt so badly that I honestly wondered if I was going to have to call 911.
There were nights when I couldn’t sleep because I was thinking about water, drainage, rain and whether what I was building would actually work.
There were moments when I wanted to throw my hands up and say,
I’m done.
But I wasn’t.
I kept going.
I learned.
I moved soil.
I placed rocks.
I adjusted.
I watched the rain.
I learned where the water wanted to go.
And eventually, something changed.
The berm stopped looking like a pile of work and started looking like a place I had created.
Maybe it will never be perfect.
Maybe Florida will throw another torrential downpour at me and make me rethink everything all over again.
That’s okay.
Because I’m beginning to understand that the goal isn’t perfection.
The goal is progress.
And maybe that’s true of life, too.
I spent years thinking I needed to have everything figured out before I could feel settled.
Now, approaching sixty-two, I’m realizing that some of the best things in life are the things we build while we’re still figuring them out.
A garden.
A business.
A relationship.
A home.
A life.
A berm.
And maybe someday, when the plants have filled in and the rocks have settled and I can look at that space without immediately thinking about drainage, I’ll smile.
Maybe I’ll even laugh about how much sleep I lost over it.
Because I know something now that I didn’t know when I started:
The things that challenge us aren’t always here to defeat us. Sometimes they’re here to show us what we’re capable of building.
And perhaps that’s why, despite everything, I believe the berm will eventually bring me joy.
Because when I look at it, I won’t just see dirt and rocks.
I’ll see persistence.
I’ll see pain I survived.
I’ll see work I finished.
I’ll see something I built with my own hands.
And maybe I’ll see that little girl from the potato muck, too.
Only this time, the weeds aren’t bigger than her.
She’s way bigger than those weeds.
And she’s still growing.
FINISH — AFTER
What started as a drainage problem became something much bigger than me.
