The Straggler: The Home Front.

T. S. Eliot got it wrong. For the suburban homeowner it is March, not April, that is the cruelest month. Over a matter of days, the forgetful snow (you can play "spot the Waste Land allusions" with this piece) has all melted, revealing the sorry state of one's property. Is it a trick of memory, or is that state really much sorrier than it seemed the last time one saw it, back before the snow cover absolved one of any need to think seriously about maintenance? Was that rotten section of the fence really that rotten back in December? Did the rear upper gutter sag as much as it now seems to? Is this a new crack in the driveway?

Many things, of course, are still depressingly unchanged. That roof tile that slipped and fell into the lower front gutter just before Christmas has not levitated itself back into position. Presumably it's still lying there in the gutter. Presumably I shall find it when I get my ladder out and do gutter inspection -- number 15 on my list of spring chores. Oh, Lord.

Things are actually worse than usual this year because of our new waste system. When we were negotiating to buy this house back in 1992, we had an engineer go over it looking for problems. He suspected that the waste system needed replacing. (This is the far-outer suburbs of New York City, far from municipal sewerage lines. Each house makes its own arrangements.) Well, we called in a cesspool engineer, a grizzled old fellow with a lifetime's experience in his deeply unglamorous trade. He stunned us by striding across the back lawn, stopping, taking one single stab at the grass with a metal spike, and immediately striking the four-inch-diameter cap of the cesspool, buried six inches below the turf. Yes, he confirmed after further investigations, the house needed a new cesspool. Awed by the well-nigh-supernatural level of expertise displayed by this diviner of drains, this seer of sewerage, this Tiresias of the septic tanks, we made it a condition of purchase that the vendor install a new cesspool.

That was a strategic blunder. Our vendor was a person very well connected at the town hall. He easily evaded the necessary inspections and certifications, and put in the smallest, cheapest, shoddiest replacement possible. The wretched thing gave us trouble for eleven years. Finally, last December, our frustration overflowed (so to speak), and we called in a local firm to build us a new system. They showed up one day in a convoy of trucks, cranes, and backhoes, and dug a stupendous hole in our front lawn. It was all very well done -- they even moved our Japanese flowering cherry tree, root system and all, then replanted it intact when they had finished. Turf, however, was not part of their contract. They left the surface of my front garden in its primeval condition. Not much point doing anything about it in mid December, we agreed. Then the snow came and blotted out the mess . . . till last week. Now the window of my study looks out over the Ypres Salient.

And then -- the driveway! Now, I regard my driveway with considerable ...