Tea at Milk Coffee Bar (RIP) with Carly, which we ended up throwing into a to-go cup when the stand up comedy show we didn’t know was happening (stand up comedy being a thing I would never subject myself to by choice) got super racist.
Then Waffle House coffee in Florence, KY as we drove down to visit Athens, GA, where I went to grad school.
Ballpoint pen and marker.
Five weeks ago today my sweet friend Shorty died.
These are the last photos I took of her, back in September when we were still enjoying our mornings together on the front porch.
Towards the end of the summer she had started climbing into my lap if I wasn’t quick enough to dole out the nuts, and trying to crawl into my pocket to get them herself. We’d reached a level of trust that even allowed me, just a few weeks before she died, to reach out and flick a bit of dried leaf off her hear without so much as a flinch from her.
I don’t know what happened to her. One minute she was fine, running up and down the fence, wiggling her silly little stump of a tail, and taking walnuts from my hand like always. Four hours later my partner found her dead in the alley with no signs of trauma.
She’s buried in the backyard at the base of this little log feature I made in July out of some cut off pieces of utility pole the workers left in the alley when our poles were replaced.
It took me all summer to complete this job I had expected to have finished by the end of May. It’s the only big job I managed to finish all summer. But just look at how pretty my shed is.
When we went to look at rust paint colours, we assumed we’d be choosing from the traditional range: red, cyan, Tonka toy yellow, John Deere green. But we found out something very exciting: when you buy the Home Hardware store brand rust paint, you can have it tinted any colour. As in, any colour from the wall of paint chips for the regular paint. We were like kids in a candy shop.
Here’s how it looked in late June, with just the front and sides finished. That pasty non-colour on the door, with fake wood grain, is what the whole thing used to look like.
The painting seemed to take forever, because due to all the bending and crouching involved (and my ageing body and bad back) I painted the shed one side at a time. Having to plan for, and wait for, adequate stretches of dry weather dragged the project well into fall. I started with the hard part, the narrow space between the shed and the fence, and nearly passed out in there from breathing the paint fumes in that hot, tight space. Fun!
I stand at this window every single day feeling pleased with myself, and enamoured with these colours. Please don’t look at my unhemmed curtains; that’s a winter job.
Here it is in the first snowfall of the year:
And the next day, with more snow. I grew up in a much snowier place than I live in now, and my family made fun of me when I sent them this picture.
And here’s what it looks like now, a bright flash of colour in an otherwise bleak urban winter landscape, under what is, most years, about as much snow as we normally get here.
We left a gap in the fence at the back of the shed, which faces onto our alleyside parking, so that the alley cats would still have their familiar back door into the yard. Right behind the rose of Sharon is a kitty-sized gap. There’s now a row of four baby roses of Sharon here to make the kitty door more private.
