A Day Like Most
It’s almost 5:00 AM, and Patchen is quiet – no street lights, no loud sirens, no angry car horns, only the dark and still of the night. It was exactly 85 years ago today, in Plymouth, North Carolina, that I was lucky enough to be born in the USA to two loving parents. Cherishing that good fortune, I plan to enjoy and appreciate today as most days gone before.
It will be a day of putting the final touches on my annual woodshop cleanup to get ready for making a couple of hundred laser-engraved Christmas tree ornaments for the upcoming season. That will be followed by a trip to Home Depot and lunch at my favorite Italian joint in Los Altos. If time allows, I might repot some tree seedlings or tune up a bonsai in need of attention.
Book
Deck
Martini
Flag
Redwoods
Christmas trees
Deer
Garden
BarnBy the time 4:00 o’clock rolls around, I will be sitting quietly with a good book on the deck that I designed and built in 1980 with a lot of help from Skip Ricks, next to the hot tub deck that Todd and I built together decades ago. I’ll be sipping a Martini made with 3 large jalapeno-stuffed olives, 2 giant caper berries, and some Amish pickled garlic in the frozen glass I bought in Mexico many years ago.
I will enjoy the breeze, unfurl the flag that Bill Clinton, as President, sent to Mom & Dad when Scott succumbed to cancer after the Agent Orange abuse in Vietnam. The several giant redwoods that I planted in the early 1970s will be standing silently around me, along with thousands of Christmas trees, drinking in the late afternoon sun. The grassy meadow below, dating from the mid 1970s, will likely be teaming with does watching over their weeks-old white-spotted fawns jumping around like jumping beans. I will lift my glass to the rock garden that I made from local sandstone and some huge granite boulders gathered from the Truckee countryside, and to the splashing of the fountain in Lago de Salvador.
I think I will avoid thinking about reconstructing the Castor barn in the early 1980s with reclaimed redwood, hot-dipped 16-penny nails, and a very old McCullough chainsaw – remembering would only make my back hurt.
Next comes a quiet dinner with Marina, the evening news on TV, a couple of Gunsmoke or Mash reruns, then early-to-bed, early-to-rise.