Water and thoughts of the worthy beaver

It seems every place I've lived, water has conspired against me. I've been flooded out of my residence before, fought foundation issues in every house I've occupied, or when I lived in Chicago on the upper floors of apartment complexes, battled rodents fleeing water. Miles from a river, with just a tiny trickle of a creek hundreds of feet from our house, and no well, just fresh city water piped through our own purification system that's supposed to be good enough to eliminate bottled water, I really thought I had water by the short ones this time. I overlooked the fact that we built on the side of a hill. I overlooked the fact that building a house on the side of a hill acts like a really nice beaver dam. I'm so taken with the idea that we built a beaver dam, I'm going to ask Ellen to abandon her moose theme and take up the beaver for our wildlife decor. In an earlier post, a long time ago it seems, I remarked on the muddiness of our front yard. A muddiness that took days and days to go away. Yep. The water flows down the hill until it stops at our doorstep. It has nowhere to go from there. Oh sure, the house is dry. Jim did a great job with the foundation, but the yard will be a sea of mud after every rain. Marsh grass would have the best chance to survive for our landscaping. This is no minor matter of grade, mind you. We even went to the trouble of laying pipe that runs beneath the mudroom, so we could install a yard drain if that became necessary. Well, it's necessary, but a yard drain is just a feeble response to the volume of our water. Now, we have to install a culvert under the driveway and grade a crown into the front yard. I really do believe this is the last budget overrun we will have to face though. It is fitting therefore, that the last financial excess on this project comes at the hand of water, my lifelong, worthy adversary. Hmm, maybe I can figure out a way to collect the rainwater, since it will be concentrated and drain through a pipe....water as my friend? Now that's a novel concept, but maybe the time has come for peace.