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There is a new word in our household vocabulary, and the first shocking thing about it is this: it came from me, not Willie. Anyone who knows us understands the gravity of that statement. Willie is usually the one out here inventing words. But here I was, standing in the front yard, birthing a brand-new term like some kind of backwoods linguistics midwife.
The second shock was how the word came out of my mouth. I swear on all that is holy and hardwood, the drawl that emerged would have convinced a passing stranger that I was born behind a bait shop in rural Tennessee. Say it with me now:
Dogscrawed (pronounced dawg scrawed)
And then there’s the meaning. You know when a hound dog has attempted—with great passion and very poor judgment—to claw its way through an old screen door? The screen is shredded. The frame is bent. The door itself has given up on life. There is no fixing it. You don’t repair that door—you put it out of its misery and tell people a bear did it.
That. That is dogscrawed.
Now let me tell you how we got there. When we first built the TRR cottage, we needed a path from the driveway to the front porch. Our soil, as you may recall, is mostly hardpack red clay. It is nature’s own version of permanent pottery. This meant that without some sort of drainage system, every rainstorm would result in a slip-and-slide of slick, red misery being tracked straight onto the porch. Enter: river rock.
River rock drains beautifully. It also feels exactly like walking barefoot across a sack of oversized marbles. So, we compromised. Down the middle of the rock path, we placed large log “cookies.” These were two feet in diameter, laid out in a tidy, civilized row. It was charming. It was rustic. It was Pinterest-worthy.
For a few years.
Then, as wood tends to do when buried in damp rock, the cookies began to return to the earth from whence they came. Willie dug them out, discovering—surprise!—that we had set these things four to six inches deep into the rock. Which is important information that would have been useful to remember before excavation.
Before he could get the new flagstones in place, the sky fell.This was not a gentle rain. This was not a cozy drizzle. This was a full-blown Carolina weather tantrum. It was the kind that rains all day or all night. Or all day and all night.
The result? A rock path riddled with a dozen giant, water-filled craters, each one a tiny reflecting pool of regret. They couldn’t drain properly because beneath them lay that stubborn red clay, sealing in the water like a Tupperware lid snapped shut by Satan himself.
I stood there, surveyed the scene, felt something ancient rise up in my chest, and declared:
“Well… this path is absolutely dogscrawed.”
And friends, there was no more accurate word in the English language.