The Perfect Song Blog

Saturday, April 26, 2008

Back home I put the tire on the tractor and take the weights off the back tires that I have to put on each winter for traction to use the plow. I then settle in to try to get the chains off. It’s usually a two-minute job but the guy who overhauled the tractor in the fall put the chains on as a favor and clamped them so tight I can’t remove them. I spend an hour, then finally give up and bend one of the links until I can slide it off, loosening t he rest of the chain and removing the master link.

I do this in between throwing the ball for Zeus, the German Shepherd. Every Shepherd should have his own flock of sheep or herd of cows so he can do what his genes tell him to and not reduce him to chasing a ball over and over. Although he seems to really enjoy it.

Then I start on the other tire. . .

I take a break and have a pipe and a coffee.

Leigh finds me and asks if we can put up the length of siding that blew off in a storm this winter. I haul out the ladder and climb to the top where the siding is missing just below the roof. A hornet swoops about, letting me know I’m precariously close to his nest.

After awhile he understands I’m not interested in it and goes away. I wonder if it’s part of local hornet lore that there’s this bearded guy who comes around every so often and sprays nests, killing all who are it in and anyone unfortunate to return and get their feet in the gunk.

I imagine they might talk about it. I mean, there are survivors in every genocide.

As I stand at the top of the ladder trying to get the siding to fit, the sky grows very dark and thunder cracks, echoing through the valley. The wind picks up. I don’t want to quit but it occurs to me that standing on a metal ladder with lightning just to the west and heading toward us is not very smart.

I ask Leigh to get me some white nails. She finds a few and I cheat. After I fit the siding in, I tack the nails into it so the wind won’t blow it down again.

I climb down the ladder just as the storm hits.

When it passes I go back out and spend a half hour putting the belts on the garden tractor mower.

Then it’s dogs in the Jeep and down to Miniers to find food for supper because we’ve both been outside working and I didn’t get groceries last week. I feel like a mountaineer going into town and bringing back grub.

I go for the quick stuff, things that we rarely ever eat – sausage and sauerkraut, barbecue flavored shredded beef. Pasta salad from the deli. Corn chips for the TGI Friday’s spinach cheese dip that I bought at Tops a month ago.

We have supper and another storm hits with a huge dark and greenish sky, meaning everything is right for a tornado formation somewhere. But that passes and we’re pelted with a good old-fashioned thunder storm.

We clean up. I fry the trout that my designer’s husband sent me because they know I love fresh fish. I cook it with Greek seasoning and will have it for lunch this week.

The dogs are beat from a day of frisking around, taking turns hanging with me and Leigh as we worked on separate projects.

I come up and write my thoughts here, and later we’ll watch a recorded TV program, probably Numbers or Without a Trace.

And that will be enough.

Saturday, April 26, 2008

After breakfast I gather up the garbage and the recyclable stuff. The three dogs jump in the Jeep. I toss in the garbage and my flat garden tractor tire. The first stop is the bank to cash a check. I don’t use cash much anymore but it’s good to have.

It’s a breezy sunny day in the 70s – not April weather. I pull into the transfer station. There’s a line of cars down the road though there are none up by the bins. Finally I see that there is one car at the top of the drive with two really slow middle aged people pulling out their recyclable stuff. They’ve parked right in the middle of the drive so no one can get around them.

No one honks. They’re too polite. . . When the car finally moves, we all pull up to the unloading area. Frank, the man in the trailer who sells the garbage bags, smiles, “How ya doin’?” I say fine, great weather. He nods. “My apple blossoms are out already. I hope we don’t get a frost.” I say we could. “Oh, yeah, about every two years that happens. “

I backtrack to Christianson Tire and leave my tire and inner tube. The nice young man at the desk says he’ll do it himself. Outside, I find myself thinking about the coming week. On Monday I attend to the burial of my younger brother, Rick. He was too young to die but did and left an empty space in a lot of hearts.

Someday, when I can, I’ll write more about him, his life.

I ‘m in Christianson’s parking lot looking across Rt. 86 at the complex composed of department stores, Circuit City, a pet store and a Wal-Mart super center. The land used to hold the world’s largest A&P plant but it went bust in the early ’80 and sat vacant for a quarter of a century.

I’m surveying the retail complex and realize I’m looking at exactly what’s wrong in the country. Places where we produced things then exported them are now gone and replaced with stores that sell things they’ve imported.

Wednesday I’m scheduled to have a broken molar capped. It will involve numbing and drilling with my head bent back for an hour. My dentist is involved in reviving a small, family amusement park and he’ll talk about the Coast Guard test he has to pass to navigate a dragon boat in the park pond.

I head over to Lowe’s where I pick up seed beds, garden gloves for Leigh, and poison to kill the tent caterpillars that ravage our weeping cherries each year.

I run into Audrey who used to work for me in the 1980s when we had word processing staff. She retired a long time ago but I was still surprised when she said she’d be 81 next week. “The thing that bothers me the most is being treated differently because I’m old,” she said. “Hey, I have a computer. I have a cell phone. I text message. . . .”

I go back to Christianson’s. The nice young man has my tire. “The other one was bad,” he said. “I put the new one in. I don’t know if it was defective or I punctured it so I put one of ours In and I ain’t gonna charge you for it.”

“Thanks. So you sell inner tubes here?”

“Yeah.”

I felt a little foolish for bringing in a tube from a farm supply store down the road.