Progress on the house has been slow again this week. The carpenter was preparing for the window install, which I’m told is happening any day now. When I stopped by the house on Saturday there were long thin boards painted white, set out on sawhorses to dry. These are going to be the jambs, I think. I’m hoping for a swift install; we had our first 40-degree night this week and I can already feel winter around the corner.
Saturday there was an alley cleanup in the neighborhood. The city provided our block club with a dumpster and tools for clearing out the trash and “alley trees” – thick, hearty, overgrown weeds, some as tall as ten feet, and smelling of peanut butter and old coffee – in the alleys between the blocks.
Late in the morning some grade-schoolers in the neighborhood got wind our project and came to help. First it was a three cousins from a block over, who then spread the word, and by the time I left mid-afternoon our group of little helpers had tripled. In addition to loading wheelbarrows with yard waste and dragging large branches to the dumpster, we spent a good amount of time trying to negotiate the kids away from the hedge sheers and saws. While I was connecting a small, powered-off electric chainsaw:
Me: Stand back. Kid: Can I try the chainsaw? Me: I can’t let you touch that. Kid: Why not? Me: You might cut yourself. Kid: No I won’t. Me: What would your mom do if you cut yourself with that? Or your cousin? Kid: She’d cuss me out. Me: See, if I let you use those and you get hurt, your mom’s going to cuss me out. I don’t want that to happen. Kid (sheepish): That’s not gonna happen …
