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"And so to bed." (with thanks to Dr. Johnson)

Category: gardening and old home restoration | Posted: Mon Aug 02, 2010 4:51 pm


"And so to bed." (With thanks to Dr. Johnson)


There is a sense of accomplishment in having come to the point in your efforts that you can sleep in a real bed rather than on the floor in an inflatable something-or-other. I feel a bit like a champion being able to share that I can rest upon a bed at last. It is the culmination of efforts now five years old and untold hours of work.

In my dreams and in reality, I move back and forth between the worlds of the home I live in, with its formal garden and with the hope of building a new Tuscan home and meadow garden, and the 200-year pile in eastern North Carolina, named Melrose, that I inherited. Today, in my split personality, I reflect on Melrose.

It is only this year, and specifically this summer that the efforts of my work have allowed me to erect a real bed in a bedroom that has been painted, carpeted, and fitted for human habitation. Melrose has been more a campground than actual home for years now, and in truth it will be hard to accommodate the new reality that getting up in the morning is not necessarily an exercise that begins from six inches above the floor. Oh glorious mattress! Oh maximum rest!

And maximum rest of what is called for following a day of painting, scraping, cutting and moving heavy objects from point A to point B, and in all too many instanes, back to point A. When working at Melrose, one does not go to bed. One falls onto a bed with all the grace of a goonie bird coming in for a landing.

I have reached that point in my life where, when I do something resembling lunacy as I go about polite society, I have the common sense to ask myself, "What the hell do you think you are doing?" There was a time in my youth and middle age, when the fact that something I was doing was more likely to be done by a lunetic, I would not have paid the least attention to such a fact. I would have pushed ahead. But, a saner, older and grayer head now prevails.

Recently, I had to ask myself that "what the hell...." question as I stood atop a 25-foot ladder at the lower end of an eight-foot high shutter that once served to hold winter winds at bay for a bedroom on the second floor of Melrose. The shutter, like all of Melrose's 46 shutters, is in awful condition and it is my considered opinion that all of them should come down and stay down. In a perfect world, all of the shutters would be replaced using the original hardware and the old shutters would be burned. But I do not live in that perfect world, cannot afford to replace all the shutters, and have decided to put them in one of the outbuildings for my sons to deal with after I have gone to the great restoration center in the sky. Melrose will have no shutters for the remainder of my life.

Which brings me back to my being atop that 25-foot ladder. The shutter I was determined to take down is connected to the exterior wall by two pins about four inches high. My job was to first loosen the shutter from years of accumulated paint on those pins, and then to nudge the shutter up and off of those pins. I was never a good physics student, but I quickly became aware of one of nature's laws which declares that when you are lifting something tall and heavy and you are doing so from it bottom, the chances are that- it being top heavy- will begin to topple backwards. And, should you be atop a ladder, the physics lesson will include the "you" of this story being pulled off the ladder, still clutching the shutter, and falling onto eastern North Carolina soil. It is sandy but it ain't that soft.

Such was a recent educational moment for me, except by the Grace of God I did not fall, and neither did the shutter. Somehow, before the laws of gravity kicked in, I was able to slide the shutter ever-so-slowly down between me and the ladder, and then to carry the shutter back to terre firma. But as I went through this exercise in terror, I pledged to never again repeat what I had just gone through. Sometimes, the things that don't happen to you are the best teachers.



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Comments

 

Frank wrote on Tue Aug 03, 2010 9:09 am:


It's only when you think back you can realise the danger you were in. I did a similar risky thing a few weeks back, and would never attempt it again. I don't know what possessed me.




 

Kay wrote on Wed Aug 04, 2010 7:22 pm:


I'm so glad you did not topple off the ladder!
I can relate to that "what in the H are you doing?" thoughts, as I get older, I need to remember not to take risks! I now always get a youngster to do the heavy work!





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