a journey in a single day

he looked at me like i was completely nuts.

"you want to do what?"

"mow the backyard."

"WHAT backyard?"

it's true that while the house is 95% completed and we are 100% moved in and maybe 60% unpacked, the yard is 99% a construction war zone. landscaping is planned for the spring, but we've got to take a breather on the spending and have a little financial recovery time.

still, after the couple of weeks of freezing temps, today was absolutely stunning. sunny and warm, bright blue sky - the kind of day that lures you to do yard work, and you don't even mind. but there's a lot of trash out there, and remnants of the different stages the house has been through, and one of the things we *did* manage to save from "before" was our lawnmower. jacko didn't want me to kill it the first time i mowed at the new house (not to mention that there isn't actually much grass back there at this point).

so instead i went on my own little reconnaissance mission. the dogs have been hanging out in the backyard (when it hasn't been freezing) and fenway still has a lot of puppy tendencies (all 80 pounds of her) which leads her to think that chewing on rebar scraps is a good idea and that styrofoam is meant to be ingested. so i went out there to see if i could clean things up a bit (and with secret hope that i would do such a stellar job that jack would agree it was mowing time).

the stuff littering the backyard lead me back through our journey of the past 14 months, though not sequentially this time. i found scraps of things that had been on the deck during the fire, shattered and sooty, next to bits of roofing shingles. lots of broken glass was aside rebar and PVC tidbits. i found the fluorescent "warm zone" tape that the firefighters had wrapped around the exterior perimeter of the backyard tangled up with the temporary electrical pole that had been erected when we first brought power to the construction site. i found discards from literally every stage of our journey. it made me realize that i wish i had taken photos of all the many different crews who had worked on the house since, as i told them, they were part of our story now (usually in my broken spanglish). i wish i had been organized from the start and had written down every single donation and every single hug - who gave and said and did what. i wish i had kept a detailed record of the reconstruction - where everything came from, how much it cost, models and colors and styles. unfortunately, none of that happened. and i forgive myself. a lot of things are still strong in my memory but not always the things you'd think you'd remember. sort of like how you can remember things like the phone number you had as a kid (totally useless information at this point) but not necessarily where you just put down the car keys (very useful, and timely, information). memory is a funny thing that way.

the last thing i saw in the backyard before i called it a day was something that fenway actually brought to me. neither singed nor sooty, it was (most of) a tennis ball. clearly a tennis ball from "before" that had sat in the yard, neglected, and watched the whole story unfold for 14 months through beating sun and pouring rain, and yes, even snow. and now, since i was depriving fenway of perfectly good rebar to chew on, the tennis ball had found it's rightful purpose once again. it was very funky, filthy, and extremely weathered. just the way fenway likes them.