Mostly OK

[thisnewday]

It's a bright, pleasantly warm, September afternoon in the Northeast. This time of day, the back steps are still shaded by the neighbor's house, at least the top two or three of them, so it's a good place to sit and read.

At the end of the driveway is the 10x10 patio that my son and I set with red pavers a month or so ago. We did this between the incessant rains which seemed to alternate with blazing heat and humidity for most of the summer. One day you'd excavate for the gravel base under the pavers and the next day you'd watch the site fill with run-off from the latest storm. Luckily, it was well enough drained that, by noon the next day, you could be out there sweating your ass off to keep the job going.

In the end, it was one of those projects where you say, with a certain resignation in your voice, "Well, we learned a lot from that one." For those lucky few who've mostly breezed through life, this roughly translates as, "Well, we got it done and we know it's not perfect and we truly believe that we'd do it better next time but now it's done so we're mostly OK with that."

On the patio is a picnic table with attached benches and it's finished with a light grey deck stain which contrasts with the red pavers. It's from one of those kits they sell at Lowe's for half what it would've cost to build from scratch. To make it a little nicer, though, I've cut the corners off the table top (to match the benches, duh) and routered the edges with a quarter-round bit. I've also assembled it with deck screws instead of the nails that came with the kit. Hopefully it'll last more than a few years but, either way, I know that I'm not taking it with me.

Along the far side of the driveway and patio is a chain-link fence that separates our property from the neighbor's. Along the near side of the patio and along the bottom are nursery-bought Arbor Vitae. They'll eventually grow to about 15 feet in height and 3 feet in width. Each one is planted in a mixture of topsoil, peat moss, sand and sterilized manure. Around the base of each is a moisture-retaining blanket of red-orange mulch which looks kind of cool next to the red pavers.

Someday, someone will be able to sit out on the patio, almost any time of day, and be in the shade. Whoever that is, think kindly of me. But watch out for that third from last row of pavers. There's a couple there that we never got levelled just right...

LPK
LiveJournal
8.31.2006

Comments

Was it a diet?

[swamp-rose.livejournal.com]

ah, you've lost some weight.

Re: Was it a diet?

[olbuksings.livejournal.com]

i guess that becomes an interesting question if it leads us to ask what it is that writers digest. experience, maybe? the work of other writers, perhaps? or, at the other end of things, wood-grain alcohol, our own delusions or those of others which we've managed to adapt/adopt because we've come to question the sufficiency of our own?

if that's where the question finally takes us, then yes, a change of diet. and that's probably an ok answer as long as we understand and admit that it can mean we're only binging on something different for now or for the time it takes our own tiny grain to fall through that ever so narrow place in the hourglass of eternity.

(a footnote here, to nick flynn's "another bullshit night in suck city," would be appropriate, i think...)

Re: Was it a diet?

[olbuksings.livejournal.com]

hmm. bet you're sorry you asked. that's gotta be a little like having some bum throw up on your shoes. after you were kind enough to give him a buck for coffee. make mine regular, please...