clay ball | Bertram's Blog

Off Balance

August 9, 2026 — Pat Bertram

This town is supposedly built on a giant ball of clay that moves, which puts doors out of plumb, even shifts foundations at times, and then it rolls again and everything moves in the opposite direction. I don’t know the truth of the “ball,” though there is no doubt that the soil here is heavy clay that doesn’t hold moisture. It’s also true that doors close differently at times, though, as someone pointed out, that could be due to moisture or lack thereof. Still, when I have to pull my north/south facing doors in tight to get them to latch, I also have to pull my garage pedestrian door in the same direction. And when I have to push the doors hard to get them to latch, the same thing happens to the garage door.

Also, a couple of years ago, I had to fix part of my foundation. There was a huge crack four feet from the corner on the western side of the southwest corner, as well as a huge crack four feet from the corner on the southern side, and that whole corner section moved several inches toward the southwest. Clay ball? Maybe. Moisture or lack of moisture? Could be. I don’t truly don’t know. All I know is that it happened. (I was able to get the foundation fixed. Whew!)

There is also a piece of concrete in the foundation that I had put in place to cover the coal chute since the coal burning furnace is long gone (and I wouldn’t know where to get coal anyway). That concrete slab moves back and forth — sometimes there is a fist-sized gap; sometimes no gap at all. The reason I had to have that chute blocked off is that the concrete that had blocked it off many years ago moved away from the house and sunk into the ground, making it useless.

So, the unstable clay ball could be the cause of all that. Or not. Who knows.

What brings this up today is that recently, at least a half dozen friends and acquaintances in this area have fallen. Me, included. I tripped on the edging around my lawn and fell slowly onto the cushioning grass that left me unharmed but with a single bruise I didn’t even know I had until days later, and more importantly, I had no trouble getting up, ungainly though my rise might have been. Not everyone was as lucky — some of the injuries were rather severe with a couple of people ending up in the hospital and needing care afterward.

It just seems bizarre that so many of us older women who have not even been in contact with each other lately have all fallen around the same time, especially since a couple of us are not prone to falls. I joked that maybe the earth moved and unbalanced us all, and once we’re acclimated, we’ll all be fine. Or it could be that the clay ball moved and did the same thing. (What makes the local ball the lesser explanation is that one of the falls did not take place around here, but at least five did, so that non-local fall could simply be an outlier.)

I do know it’s not one of those situations where once you become aware of something, you see it everywhere, because we all find out when one of our ilk falls, and generally it’s a one off.

But this time? There were too many falls. It must have been that old clay ball, either the local one or the entire globe putting us all off balance.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

Well, no — I’m not sticking to that story, much as I liked it. I have a hunch we’re all dealing with the summer blahs as well as a heat wave that could be messing with our equilibrium.