Garage Detail

The day dawned crisp and cool as fall made its presence known. In the distance, we could hear the band warming up on the football field for what will be the first of many contests this year. And though we have spent many weekends at such contests, this will be the first year we don't attend.

Nor will we be driving early to basketball games now that our daughter drives herself.

Which leaves a lot of time for cleaning up the garage.

What is a garage, really? 21 years of married stuff that accumulates until it either bursts into flames, thanks to greasy rags and buckets of old paint or it just slowly begins decaying thanks to greasy rags and buckets of old paint.

But really, a garage is the remains of old projects, worn out phases of childhood and reminders of bits of life that have passed on.

This is what I thought as I stood off to the side of the garage watching my husband remove things from piles that I had painstakingly accumulated over a series of hours. Forget that I had told him six months ago that such piles would be made. Forget that I had pleaded with him and all the other creatures living in our house to find what they wanted and take it away. Forget that I had told him earlier in the week, "this Saturday is THE DAY!" so that he would perhaps take a stroll around the stuff that he calls "his".

As he stood bent over the pile he emerged with something. He held it up. "Why would you throw this away?" he asked angrily as he thrusts the "thing" up.

I looked at him with concern. In his hand he held a ten inch piece of old garden hose with two clothes hangers bent woven through the center. Not only did I not know what it was, I was certain that there was absolutely no function for such a thing.

I was at a loss for words. "I thought it was broken?" I hoped my question would reveal that I had every intention for thought and care. It did not have the desired affect.

Engineers don't get angry. They get quiet. Really, really, really quiet because their brains are working so fast on things to say and ways to passively derail you that they cannot move their mouths and talk at the same time.

I, on the other hand, have a different problem. My brain is usually not working on much at all when my mouth flies into action.

I then added, "What's a stupid thing like that doing in the garage anyway?"

Steely quiet followed with a look from my husband that I believe is reserved for those times when words cannot be formed to say how stupid I am. The kind of quiet that lets me know that the next few hours will be spent with me alone, forming piles of discarded skates and bicycles while my husband will be watching the college football games on TV.

Finally he spoke, very quietly and very slowly, which again is a sign of my lack of intelligence.
"THIS," he said pointedly, "is how I tie up the trees in the yard."

You would think that 21 years of marriage had taught me when to cut my losses and realize that nothing I said past a certain point could save me. But I am a sucker for lost causes and so I said (which made perfect sense to me at the time) , "But honey, we don't HAVE any trees in the yard."

I gasped at my own stupidity. In my attempt to get the garage clean and have this scintillating conversation I had forgotten of the care and time Dan had put into the trees on our property that had, for awhile, flourished under his prodding and care. I remembered the early summer days when he awakened to haul out the three garden hoses and hook them carefully together so that the trees would get water.

How could he have known about the weather this past summer. The summer that will no doubt go down into history as the "drought of 06"?

How could I have forgotten that even though engineers don't say much, they think a lot. And Dan had been thinking about trees and kids and jobs and other lost things.

I tried to make amends but he was inconsolable. He took the bent metal and rubber creation and laid it carefully on the work bench, piled high from clutter that had not had time to be neatly arranged.

To Do List

I'm feeling rather cocky as my weekend "to do" list is narrowing. After weeks of having weekends that were anything but restful, I had a couple of days to catch up on some projects.

I'm most excited that on the one year anniversary of Nanowrimo (www.nanowrimo.org) I have not two working projects - one fiction, one non-fiction and this weekend I have been working on the proposal that I hope to have in some sort of finished place by end of year.

Speaking of finished projects, my friend Jordan Rosendfeld has a book coming out and a new article published.
http://pacificsun.com/story_archives/bridge.html