It is official. This building has sort of pox. They haven’t torn down any more of the Poplars Building within the last week. Though work is going on at the rubble level, today.
I’m sure there’s a reason. I’m sure it makes sense right away, but I can only see the cost of non-working heavy machinery. (Where they really make their money!) Perhaps next week they’ll be back at it. Maybe the big crane operator is on vacation this week. Whatever it is, this is slowing down the reopening of the parking deck, which is going to be a problem starting Monday.
And that eyesore will still be here on Monday, as well.
Elvis stayed there once, you know, in the dilapidated administration building’s first life as a hotel. He was booked for two nights. He skipped out on the joint.
Maybe the work crews have, too.
I am contemplating the undertaking of a new project at the house. Here is a hint.
If it all works out it should probably take about two hours. Which means it would take me two weeks, because these things never go to plan.
And just when you have built a rhythm, you make some foolish mistake that makes you second-guess everything. And there might not even be enough of this project to build a rhythm anyway. Many utterances will be uttered. Oaths may be taken. No new skills will be learned. Pride will not be established.
Splinters may be avoided.
That’s worth two weeks, if you ask me.
Watering the flowers. I did this just after dinner.
Dinner tonight was one of those nights where you push up the routine, because I was hungry, and then making a deal with yourself. “OK, 6:30, we heat up dinner.”
And then, “Hey, look, 6:27. Close enough. And then you’re going to eat and go to sleep.”
So I’m that old now.
Oh, look at how that salvia holds on to the water droplets! So long as you have the wonder of small things, how old you are, or how old you feel, might not matter all that much.
That’s what I say, out loud, to drown out the sound my knees can make.
I finished this book this evening. Lighter fare, but I read slowly, savoring words and sentence structures, especially of talented writers.
May Sarton wrote 50-something books, 34 of them were novels or nonfiction, 17 were poetry. This one, if you’ve been here the last few days, is about when she bought her home. Her parents had just died. She decided on a remote lifestyle so she could concentrate on her work, and she settled on a place in a small New Hampshire village. And over the course of the 188 pages of this book she looks back on her first eight years in the home, taming the property, meeting her neighbors, constructing her gardens. She goes on at some length about her gardens. The book is about the people, and the work, and from that she’s drawing the lessons and points she wants to make. She has an incredibly compact style, a great economy of words.
Here she’s talking about a winter of drought, when she was simultaneously being dismissed from a teaching job, and getting a book rejection from a publisher. Then, all on the same day, the artesian well diggers finally hit water, she got a letter with another job offer, and a letter getting that book accepted.
She celebrated by taking a nap.
That nap made a lot of sense today. It’ll take some time to figure out the part about making myths of our lives.
The book concludes a chapter or two later. She talks about the two days of the year that the whole community comes together. Once in March, and again in August. The first is for the big meeting to manage the village, the second is Old Home Day. It looks exactly as you’d imagine. People who have at any time been connected with the village come back. There’s a band, speeches, games. There’s a dance at the end of the evening.
Over the course of the book she has shared her friends, and now she’s showing them at play. And then, in the last two pages, after this admiration for her new neighbors, she shares an anecdote that sours the place. It’s two paragraphs. It seems obvious to anyone that’s ever been a visitor or a transplant to a place and, thus, the complaint is petty. Somehow, though, May Sarton manages to turn that into a part of her love letter. That’s a writer for you.
