It was the summer of 2000, and the young, gangly awkward boy that I was and still am was preparing for a fun filled irresponsible summer before embarking on what would be my last stretch in the academic world know as grade school. The possibilities of what I could do that summer were endless. At least to me sleeping in till noon, watching mindless TV, playing Nintendo 64 till my eyes bled, gorging my tiny frame on mass quantities of junk food and getting rides to the mall seemed endless. But as has always been my luck, Mother had ulterior motives for me and my so called summer of lethargy.
I woke up one May morning to find Mother sitting at the breakfast table waiting for me with what she deemed exciting news…. To this day I still think we differ on what should excite ones emotions. I was informed that our back patio was in a sad state of affairs. Which I couldn’t disagree. The back porch of my semi new home was a dismal place. This screened in shanty town was roughly a 20x84 foot patch of neglected space that sat at the back of the Caudill-Western estate. It was covered in pastel brick pavers that came straight from the sears catalog of 1947. To say they were weathered was an understatement at the very least. Lining the inside of the porch and pavers were a wide variety of bleached ferns, shriveled shrubs and dilapidated flowers... well at one point they were flowers. Needless to say, something must be done about this sad state of affairs our patio had fallen into.
Quick and elaborate as always, Mother proceeded to lay her dreams of what our porch should look like. She envisioned a Zen garden motif with a small path leading to a two tiered koi pond that would be enshrouded by ferns and large rocks. To me this sounded wonderful, superb even. I could see this little slice of Japanese heaven in my mind’s eye. A place of mystic beauty that would wash the senses in serine beauty and tickle the ears with the subtle sounds of the babbling water. Her dreams had an infectious quality to them that started to peak even my fine young adolescent interests. So I had to ask Mother who she would be hiring to do this tedious yet stunning task. She casual smiled at me and stated that why none other than me.
The gears in my mind whirled, sputtered, caught for a moment on the fact they were trying to process, and then spun back into life trying to sort this fact and what I could do with it. Stuttering like a simple fool I squeaked, “Me? Wait you are gonna pay me? Why me?.... Really? Me?” Her smile faded for a heartbeat and then quickly reappeared. But now it had a mischievous, almost diabolical quality to it. In her always present chipper tone she told me that no I would not be paid, that I would be getting up every day at 7 to work on the porch, and that they would supply me with everything I needed and give me daily tasks that were to be completed promptly, without whining or complaining. Well this did not sit with me in the slightest. I stammered and stumbled through a long list of complaints and reason why I was unfit for this task. I was 14, unaccustomed to sunlight, 5’ 3’’, gangly as a willow switch (and probably just as strong), and barely 100 pounds soaking wet. In short I was more an ideal candidate for British nobility than manual labor. Yet no matter how hard I had tried to persuade her that I was in fact not the man for the job, she would hear nothing of it. The deal was signed without my knowledge, written in blood and tethered to my soul. I was her indentured servant for the entire summer. Good bye hopes and dreams of a season spent doing the bare minimum.
And so, early the next morning I was roused from my bed to begin my daunting task of area beautification. To start my slavery off with a bang I was tasked with the removal of all the pavers on the porch. With the Florida summer sun beating down on my Gandi-esque form I began to slip my bony fingers around the paver, heave them up from the ground they were planted in, lug them outside and stack them in neat and efficient piles of 6. With the better part of two days wasted in the act of carting the pavers to their new home out back I was ready to lay waste to the so called plants that remained on the patio.
The ground work had been completed, so to speak, and now I was ready to do the real work, as Mother put it. Real work I wondered, what the hell did I just do for the last two days? Dick about in imagination land? I was given a shovel and a large shipping crate that contained the liners for the new pond. “I want it put here, with the smaller pond set up over here so it gets a nice layered affect for the water fall” Mother flatly stated. Off I went, digging like a dog, sweating like a fat kid at Jenny Craig, and cursing like a sailor, all in all I was a hot mess indeed. Digging a pond was a daunting task that turned out to be more complex then I ever could have expected. Remove part of the Earth, put the liners in, fill around them and then add water, right? No! Dig the hole, line it with sand, fit the liner in place, fill the gaps with sand, not dirt, to cushion the ponds frame then install the pump and pipes to run from the lower pond to the smaller/higher one so the waterfall will work, and then you can think about putting water in…. after you spruce up the area around it and then clean all the sediment that has fallen in to the empty liners.
Phase two was out of the way and I had then been tasked with planeing the patio so I could then fit it with the slate pathway. Now there were many of tools I could have been given to make that task easy and quick. But as always Mother loved to see me do my yard work with the same equipment that the Chinamen used in the late 1800’s. My planer was a long wooden shaft (stop laughing) stuck into a flat square of iron. The thing had to have weighed close to my own body mass. So for the next few days I huffed and I puffed and I flattened that ground down. With the spirit of the Masons flowing thru my tiny frame I began to “lovingly” arrange the 14x14 50 pound black slate pavers into a walkway that would guide you thru the Zen like land. With my pathway all laid out I awoke the next day to a large battered white truck magically parked in the back yard. Pilled high in the bead of this behemoth was several hundred pounds of thumb sized rocks. A vast array of beige, grey and yellow stones straining the truck bed and looking for their final resting place. “Now what exactly am I supposed to do with these?” I proclaimed. Mother informed me that I was to take a five gallon bucket, fill it and then begin to coat the back porch with an even amount of said stones. Oh goody gum drops, every day my life seemed to get better and better. The days crawled by as I shoveled load after load of rocks into the bucket, struggled to drag my cargo onto the patio, dump them in strategic locations and then spread them around so they were not in a lumpy mass. Which is no easy task, seeing as how rocks by nature are just that, lumps. By this point in my so called “wonderful” project, my back felt bent and broken from the weeks of toil, my skin had an almost brick red hue due to ultra-violet rays and my fingers were as raw as a fresh cut strip steak. Yet I had miles to go before I waked, and all I did was pray the lord my soul to take.
The rocks were in place and as even as I could make them, job done, right? Not in the slightest. For now I was tasked with putting the “final touches” on the Zen garden. Orchids, ferns, white lilies and a multitude of other peaceful plants were given to me with a map of their intended locations. I was also given large black stones around knee height that were to be piled in various locations. All I could do was stare at these obsidian obelisks and wondered how in Hades I was going to be able to make them budge let alone lift them. I came to find out that they were a type of pumice, very light and razor sharp. So in a way they were a curse parading around as a blessing. After a day of moving these boulders, without gloves mind you, my hands and forearms looks like I had developed a masochistic relationship with a cheese grater. To this day the scars on my arms remind me of that horror.
A week later I placed my shovel against the shed, walked onto the porch and beheld the miracle I had created. It was a serine place of pale stone, midnight colored boulders and breath taking fauna, leading up to a pond filled with alabaster water lilies. I sank to my weary knees and began to weep like Moses must have after he and the Maccabeus escaped the clutches of the desert. My job was done, I had earned my freedom, and my soul could finally be free. Mother surveyed my work, smiled, and gave me a tender hug. “It looks perfect, my son” she told me “I couldn’t have done it better myself.” At this point my heart dropped, I had realized that tomorrow was the first day of school. My summer had been stripped away like a newborn for a crack addicted mother. Yet a glimmer of satisfaction still remained, I was done. No more grueling tasks of area beautification for me. That was until Mother gave me a smile and said “So next week you can start to clear and level a path around the house. Then use all those pavers you removed to make a lovely walkway.”
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