Bonjour mes amis: https://vermontrambles.com/2016/08/28/the-mountains-the-pond-the-leaves/
“It’s been a long time coming…it’s been a long time gone” David Crosby
Lots and lot of mountain movement, (not the bowel kind) in the last week…so let me simply present the Zen and LOTS of photos:
THE POND is on the brink of completion. Bob the Pond guy is a magician with the excavator, albeit one without a watch…..he appears- he disappears. Arriving at 8:30 means maybe arriving at 11, thus, we have been Pond prisoners for most of the last two weeks, but the damn thing now resembles a massive archeological dig- we are now in search of wooly mammoths. The whole thing is now amazingly larger with rock gardens and steps and we have a new secret area, which was once woods, that is a primeval graded pit of fertile life-filled soil. Jen spends her days out there consulting with Bob, cleaning rocks and ledges with a broom and scrubber (really) and saving the water lilies. The frogs have started to come back from vacation. We will be done today and then wait for the rainmakers to do their thing. The photo display of the process is sacrosanct. Check out the collection of long buried kitchen strainers from my years of futile skimming in the kayak.
The exercise machine extravaganza is now fully erect, though we are less than erect as a result – more like orangutans, once we finished the assembly. One can now never leave the barn and be fit as a fiddle.
Like Bob the Pond Guy, Steve the Mower Goy (should be guy, but it fits and WORD recognizes the double entendre), is equally reliable (not) and works on VSCT- Vermont Standard Contractor Time. We have been jump starting the tractor all spring and summer and waiting for Steve TMG to show up and fix it, but, alas, waiting is the Devil’s idle time, so last weekend we got the damn thing started and wired the dragging deck into a position that will now mow grass instead of rocks, so another contractor-less job completed with smoke and mirrors. All of this completed during my extended break from last week’s Blog……
Made a visit to the metropolis this week to see family and deal with the nursing home bureaucracy. Spent the night in faulty towers with cousins Sherry and Joel (without Jenn and Lucy, who stayed home to excavate with Bob), had a second reunion dinner with the extended Paul tribe (Chinese dinner for eight, of course)- these are 50 year lost and re-found cousins- and then spent a sidewalk steaming NYC day in the horrors of my childhood friend and mentors, Bob’s nursing home captivity. After a year of trying , got them to take him to look at a possible assisted living home placement in the Bronx, which he rejected before we even arrived…there is no future in being a do-gooder.
Given all the erecting and digging and stone cleaning, not a lot of time for recreating in the mountains this week, but my music club did our annual performance on the town Green music series in the midst of thunderstorms and Stu and Lucy wandered around checking out the rapidly expanding fall colors…global warming/schmobal warming- so what if the leaves start to change at the end of July. We finished the week with the last major show of the season at the Weston Playhouse –an intense presentation of Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons….I think it is safe to say Miller had some issues with his pop…which obviously led him into the waiting arms of Marilyn Monroe…..maybe she also was able to, say, dig ponds, fix tractors or assemble workout machines?
Well, Jenn just came in covered with mud and smelling of pond waste…so I better go out there and advise. Till we meet again,
Stu- Bear
