Before the Rains Come

                         

      This piece was originally a several day journal entry.  I've kept a journal for over 50 years, amounting to thousands of pages.  with a little tweaking, this was published by Willow springs Review in 2001.  I understand it was submitted to the Pushcart Prize, but didn't place.  I not surprised.  It's just a damn journal entry.  But I hope you enjoy it.

                                  Before the Rains Come

                                                  by

                                             Dick Morgan

          Some days begin with nagging pain before you even get out of bed; other days begin with energy and enthusiasm, and just enough unguarded optimism to sucker punch you before dinner time. It is the last day of August, and our family is sitting outside on the front lawn enjoying the sun when my wife notices that the porch has separated from the house more than an inch.  Our house is almost eighty years old, and some deterioration is to be expected.  I rebuilt the far side of the porch just a few years ago, but now the near side is slanted slightly outward, slowly giving way to age and dry rot.  I am no carpenter, but I know instinctively that the porch will not last out the winter.  Someone is going to have to fix it, and it surely won't be my wife or my thirteen year old daughter.  And there aren't that many days of summer left before the steady onslaught of Northwestern rain.

          I want to reach fall weather with our home all ready for that dark season; a roof that doesn't leak, clean gutters, lawn furniture scrubbed and put away, a winter's supply of firewood stored in the garage.  Now this porch affair will set my schedule back if I don't get to it right away.  Right there in the hot afternoon sun, I begin my plan of attack.

          The first step is to figure out how to pay for it.  Our family budget, consisting of my retirement pay and a few odd jobs here and there, does not accommodate major house repairs.  I will have to take out a home improvement loan.  After a few phone calls, that process is initiated quickly.  The next step is to figure out how big a job it's going to be.  While the loan is being processed, I can at least take some boards off the side of the porch and see how bad the damage is.  After a couple of hours with a crowbar and my dad's favorite hammer, I have an adequate view under the porch to assess things.  It's worse than I thought.

            The porch posts which had held up that side of the porch for seventy-five years have rotted away.  The porch has been holding onto the house only by its horizontal support, a massive six-inch by 12-inch beam which juts out from under the house.  But that main beam has almost completely dry-rotted, and has started to cave in on itself.  Consequently, the porch has begun to take a slight lean and pulled away from the house.  I can't just prop up the beam or put a post under it; there is nothing solid to prop up.  The only thing that is holding the porch together at all is the new flooring I put on about five years ago.

             And now I have a pile of debris spreading out over the lawn, and no way to get rid of it.  I will have to rent a drop box.  "Might as well get a big one, and get a lot of things cleaned out around here," my wife says, looking at me as though I were some kind of tractor.  I know how the phrase "a lot of things" translates in the language that passes for communication between people who have been married long enough to have a teenaged daughter.  It means I'm going to be distracted from my job an unknown number of times, and to my wife, roughly, "I'll point, and you carry."  So I rent the box.

           After the box arrives, it suddenly becomes necessary to trim the huge apple tree in the back yard, empty the compost heap of non-biodegrading elements such as the stones, bricks, extra cement, and old boards from previous construction gambits, clean out the garage and the attic, and trim the shrubbery around the house.  Finally, it's time to load the debris from the porch.  After that is accomplished, our house has a huge hollow cave under one end of it, and the month of September is well underway.  Our daughter is now back to school and unable to help with the project.  But at thirteen, that help really wouldn't have been worth the attitude anyway.  More important, each day the sun sets further in the south, and each day, I have a little less energy.

           I married late, and our daughter did not come along until I was already forty.  Now she will soon be 14, and I am 54.  I am in fairly good shape from regular exercise and an interest in sports, but 54 is not an age to begin a career in heavy construction, especially alone, and not knowing what you are doing. 

My father was a carpenter.   I was my daughter's age when, all by himself, he built the house her grandmother still lives in.  But I did not pay enough attention to how it was done, can't remember the steps involved, nor the order in which they happened.  I barely remember my father's face; he died of cancer when I was 30.  I do remember him on the half-built roof though; I would look up at him high above my head, atop the skeleton walls, sidestepping along the tops of the studs with a huge four by eight redwood beam across his shoulders, stopping to catch his breath.  He'd cough until he turned beet red, then spit, and heft the beam a little further up his shoulder like it was his own personal cross.   There were twenty beams in that ceiling, and he only asked for help with the last two.

           All I have left of him is his old, leather-handled claw hammer, a few old photographs, and the memory of him telling me decades ago that I ought to go to college because I wasn't very good at working with my hands.  Lately I've also developed the little round stomach he had in his later years, and his dry cough, too.  I only hope I have the stamina to finish this porch repair before the rain comes-- a small job by my father's standards, but necessary, and therefore right, he would have said.  My only regret is that these house repairs take away from my writing time, and the manuscript I am working on languishes in its word-perfect crypt, fading from memory and exigency.  The ambition to finish it is almost like some other life, not my own.  All I have time for now is to finish the porch before the rains come.

           After I haul all the debris down off the front yard to the dumpster, I stand beside the black maw that used to be the side of our porch, and my wife stands beside me.  She shakes her head and puts her finger to her chin, just below her lower lip, a sign I recognize as ominous.  "You know..." she begins with a hesitation, the kind that the longer it is, the larger and more far-reaching the suggestion piles up behind it.  After what seemed fifteen minutes or so, she says, "It sure would be nice if this side of the porch had a set of stairs, too."  She moves her hand at a right angle to the main set of stairs.  "Then we could walk straight out here onto the lawn instead of around that long way.  I'd like to make this a sitting area."

             I don't hold it against her that she has no idea how much work she has just waved into being.  We have the sort of working relationship whereby it is her job to envision things, and it is my job to bring them about.  I imagine she thinks that since I'm holding a hammer anyway, I might as well pound a few extra nails.  The hammer in her mind is like the magic wand in Cinderella; the fairy godmother waves it a few times, and voila, there's a cute miracle.  I do recall that none of Cinderella's miracles involved cement work, though.

             My first task is to dig holes under the side of the porch in which to pour cement bases for the porch posts.  I clear out the rocks, old bottles, rotten boards and dirt, digging down about a foot in three separate spots.  Then I go to the lumber yard for the cement.  Each bag weighs 80 pounds, and I have to use my wheelbarrow to carry them from my jeep up the steep slope of our front yard.  I can only wheelbarrow one of them at a time, and after each load, I am out of breath.  I wear a bandana around my forehead to hold my glasses in place, and to keep from sweating into my eyes.  One at a time, I split the cement bags into my wheelbarrow, add water, and stir with my big shovel until it is a uniform gooey mess.  Then I shovel it into the holes. In the center of each hole, I place a bolt pointing upwards in the wet cement.  After four bags of cement, I am breathing so hard, I have to take a pill, the kind one takes for an asthma attack.  I haven't had asthma problems for years, but I keep the pills on hand because I've been short of breath lately, and they seem to help.

             The next day, after the cement has dried, I begin to plan how to put in pressure treated 4 x 4's to act as porch posts.  I measure where they are to go, but I discover another problem.  The main support beam of the porch crumbles to the touch.  The 4 x 4's will push right through it.  I'll have to reinforce this beam in order to prop up the porch.  I go to the lumber yard and bring back a section of pressure treated, bug-and-water resistant 2 x 12, which I measure and cut.  My plan is to place this sturdy board under the rotted section, and prop up the porch by supporting this new board with the porch posts.  Only then do I discover that the main beam which I am supporting with this new board is engaged in the delicate art of rotting at an angle, and that the underside of this main beam is not level.  I can either level it with a hammer and chisel, a process which could take days, not to mention a lot more patience than even my sainted father would have had, or I can prop up the porch with a board the underside of which is diagonally canted, which means my porch posts will have to be beveled at an angle, and may someday slip out from under the porch and the whole thing fall down.  But, if I anchor them in cement and use enough nails at the top, it should last a good long while, and anyway, will be all covered up so that no one will see my shoddy carpentry, and I'll probably be dead by then anyway.  I decide on the second option, the one that suggests impatience and shoddy work, but which will be neatly covered up in the end.  Life is just a succession of punting and patchwork, and keeping things together as long as you can.  In the end, it's just a half-completed puzzle; sometimes the whole picture is visible, sometimes not.

                   The new steps present the biggest challenge.  First, they have to land on something besides lawn.  That means I will have to cut the two stair runners to size, and see where they land in order to know where to lay in a cement pad.  I figure that since the other set of stairs had six steps, this new set would too.  But when I measure the reach of the old steps, I conclude that the new ones, built to the same specifications, will sprawl clear into the middle of the lawn and sort of overpower it.  I may not be a carpenter, but I do have a residual aesthetic sensibility.  No problem, I think; I'll just shorten the steps.  But I soon rediscover that nothing is quite so simple.

                   Stairs are normally twelve inches wide by six inches high for a reason.  It's not a matter of an easy step up and adequate foot clearance.  It's because those measurements drop the steps at exactly a 30 degree angle, and all the lumber is available in the right size.  If you change any of the measurements, all the other measurements change as well.  If I shorten the step, then the rise will shorten too, or else the angle will change.  And of course, I don't discover these trigonometric nuances until after I have ruined a perfectly good and very expensive pair of two-by-twelves.  Eventually, I keep the 30- degree angle, and shorten the steps to nine inches and the risers to four and a half, which means that I will have to custom cut each riser individually, since there is no lumber that size.  The whole process gives me a terrific headache, and a couple of times, a nosebleed.  I dismiss it as too much squinting into the sun, and not enough hydration.  At least the weather is holding, and I am getting a nice end-of-the-summer tan.

                   After the step runners are completed, I set them in place off the side of the porch, and begin figuring the calculations for the cement pad on which they will have to land.  I figure the pad must extend about a foot wider than the steps, and to about two feet in front of the last step.  But how will the steps be secured to the cement pad?  I decide to dig two holes in the bottom of my forms; I will first pour a cement base with spikes at their centers, and then place four-by-fours on top of the spikes.  But this presents yet another difficulty.   I can see where the steps are going to land in terms of side to side, but I can't tell where in relation to up and down.  It was like a jigsaw puzzle.  I won't know where the end of the new steps will land until I build the forms for the cement pad, but I can't pour the cement until I figure out how high to pour it, which means I have to know where the steps will land.  I begin to understand why carpenters only work with wood, and cement workers stick to their own medium, like special surgeons who only operate on spleens.  There is just too much math involved for one head.

                   I begin to dig a four foot by five foot hole in the front lawn, shoveling the dirt into an abandoned and neglected flower bed in the shade of the house.  I dig down about eight inches, which, as I do the math in my head goes something like this; four feet by five feet by two-thirds of a foot is twenty by two-thirds, or roughly thirteen square feet.  But I will have to dig down much deeper for the post holes.  That would add at least another square foot per hole. And where are those holes going to go, anyway?  I finish digging the main hole to a level of eight inches and go to the lumber yard for boards to build forms with.  I figure twenty feet of 1x8 boards, the kind my father used to call "shiplap", will do the trick.  I find out they haven't made shiplap in twenty years, and have to buy 2 x 8's at triple the cost.  And while I'm picking up lumber, I begin bringing home bags of concrete, only four at a time, so I don't overload my old Jeep, and because, after wheeling just four bags up onto the lawn one at a time, I am exhausted and breathing so hard I have to take another pill.  Breathing with difficulty after a strenuous but only short exertion is sometimes a concern.  Twenty years ago, I'd have wheeled those bags up the yard two at a time, with another one on my shoulder, and not missed a breath nor raised my heart rate.  Now, sometimes I'm so winded, it hurts at an obscure depth, as though some small but vital part of me has stopped functioning, and the rest of me is trying to get the job done around it.

                   I finish the forms for the cement pad and then lay out an elaborate web of string from pegs around the perimeter of the hole.  I can now figure both where the post holes will go, and how high to pour the cement so that the stairs will end up level.  I disassemble the step supports, dig two holes exactly beneath the matrix of my web, and mix two bags of concrete to pour into the bottoms of the holes.  Only after the concrete is a gooey slush do I discover my error; two bags of concrete weigh 160 pounds.  After I've added roughly two gallons of water, plus the weight of the wheel barrow, I discover I am going to have to move and pour around 200 pounds of sloshing mess.  I put on my weightlifting belt to protect my back; I place a ramp of lumber from the wheelbarrow to the form, an ill-planned twelve feet away, and pump myself up, breathing hard, like a weightlifter before a lift.  When I begin lifting on the wheelbarrow handles, I use my best form, legs working like an athlete; but my breath catches, and there is a sting deep in my chest.  I can't stop now, though, or the concrete will just dry inside the wheelbarrow, so I nudge it into motion and run at the form with all my strength.  The wheel of the wheelbarrow catches on the edge of the form, which lifts the handles before I'm ready, and the back lip of the wheel- barrow hits me in the center of my chest and knocks the air out of me.  The wheelbarrow spills sideways, and I fall into a pile of lumber, coughing and gasping for air.  I lie there for quite a while, until I can clear my airway because of the spasms in my chest, and now my irritated throat.  I spit into the flower bed, and I notice my sputum is dark.  I wipe my mouth with my white handkerchief; it comes away pink.  I will wash the handkerchief by hand, and no one will find out.

                      At least something has gone right; I managed to lose control of the wheelbarrow in exactly the right spot.  The post-holes are accidentally filled with concrete.  I re-establish my string matrix, place spikes in exactly the right spots, and sit back onto the pile of lumber.  "There now," I say with a hoarse voice I haven't used all day.  But I do some calculation, and figure I'll have to buy and lug up onto the lawn at least sixteen more bags of cement, which I have learned the hard way will have to be mixed one bag at a time.  It will take three days, I figure, given my age and condition.  It will take me the best part of one day to buy and move that many bags of concrete to my form site, and another whole day to mix and pour it.  The third day is for the cement to dry.  Fortunately, the weatherman says the weather will hold for a few days more, but it is mid-September, and the days are shorter and cooler, the sun less dependable.  I will have to hurry to beat the rains, and I begin to feel an impatience near to desperation.  I just hope my health will hold out long enough to finish.  I work into the dusk, positioning the new step posts and bracing them exactly level-- up, down, and sideways.  I go back to the lumber yard for more cement.  It is actually dark by the time I knock off.

                   I haven't told anyone about the blood.  This isn't the first time I've coughed up pink sputum.  It happens every once in awhile.  I think it's part of aging;  I'm short of breath, cough and hack up ugly messes with disgusting noise, I belch and sometimes fart before I'm even aware it's happening.  My daughter doesn't want me around her friends because I embarrass her.  But the shortness of breath is more than just an embarrassment.  It has worsened over the summer, so that I take the asthma pills several times a day now.

                   I went to the doctor for a check-up a couple of weeks ago.  He said the X-ray showed no spots at least, but he thought there might be some fluid there and wanted to do some tests.  Also, my heart was slightly enlarged, as though compensating for some physiological inadequacy.  In addition, the ECG test showed something irregular.  The doctor wants to do a stress test, and left a message to call him for a conference about the numbers on my blood work.  It was a relief about the X-ray; that's all I was really interested in knowing about.  I haven't returned the doctor's call because I don't really want to talk to him right now.  I have work to do and only so much energy to do it.  One thing at a time, I say.  And I don't want to waste precious time listening to a man half my age tell me I could do a better job with getting old.  I am in touch with my body and know that something is out of balance. I'll make a point of going in after the porch is complete.  Right now I have to work before the weather turns, and I can't think about my health, my writing, or anything else.  I just want this one job done.

                   I begin the cement work the next morning, a bright, cloudless September day.   The first couple of wheelbarrows full of cement go quickly; I am strong and well rested; I pour them exactly where they need to go and smooth out the wet concrete around the step posts.  By noon, though, my back has begun to ache in spite of my weightlifting belt.  Each time I stir and wheel, pour and smooth a new load, I have to rest a little longer before I heft another 80 pound bag of concrete into the wheelbarrow.  After the lifts I have to clear my lungs and spit away a big loogie.  I've stopped looking at them; I don't want to know what color they are.       

          By three o'clock, I'm down to the last two bags, and the level of my cement is not yet up to my marks on the step posts.  I may need another trip to the lumber yard; I curse.  I am so tired, I don't know if I can even drive safely, let alone haul more bags of concrete.  My mouth is dry, my throat is sore from coughing, and I can feel my heart beating like an engine with a bad plug.  But I have to finish this in one day or the concrete will dry in layers and crack apart.  I am determined that if this is the last thing I ever do, it will be a good cement pad for the new steps.  It occurs to me that I have to stop thinking like this.  It can't be good for the immune system to suspect something is amiss in the middle of your chest.  I decide that as I mix and pour the last two bags of concrete, I will silently sing a new mantra:  Hard work is good for the body; Hard work is good for the soul.  Hard work on a labor of love makes me strong, healthy, and whole...

          When I am finished pouring the last mix of concrete, the level of the new cement pad is within an eighth of an inch of the line I have scrawled on the step posts.  I smile and straighten up slowly, painfully, after working bent over all day in the sun.  My eyes hurt from squinting, and my back is one long ache, but my lungs are clear, and I haven't coughed in the last half hour.  Strong, healthy, and whole, I chant.   I remember my father saying of his carpentry, a sixteenth of an inch is a good margin of error, but a quarter inch is acceptable.  An eighth is damned good for an English major; I can feel my father smiling down on me, even though he's been dead more than twenty years.

          I rest a few minutes while the cement firms up a bit, then trowel the surface smooth.  It doesn't look like rain is due any time soon, and I am so bone tired, I just go inside and leave everything out in the open, except my dad's hammer.

          The next morning, I'm so sore I have trouble getting out of the bed, and make a sound like a weightlifter before a clean and jerk.  I swing my feet out with a loud grunt followed by a wet cough, and I hear my daughter saying from the other room, "Well, Dad's up."  I know she's rolling her eyes, even though I can't see her.  Well, what does she know about stiffness and pain?  Her idea of trauma is wearing the wrong clothes to school, or shopping at K-Mart for underwear with her parents.   She couldn't possibly know about being winded just climbing stairs, or about this persistent pain in the side, undoubtedly a pulled muscle from yesterday's cement work.

          I can't feel my feet.  Actually, I can feel them, but only as blocks of stiffness which have spent too long carrying heavy loads in worn-out shoes.  I work them in circles until they don't hurt, then step down on them and find they are the only part that doesn't ache, which is good; five-percent of me is okay.  It's a start.  Today will be an easy day; the cement is still wet, so I will have to work around that.  But today is a rest up day, maybe one trip to the lumber yard for step boards, plywood, and nails.  Maybe I'll take some time off to write in my journal, and check my official papers.  I really ought to read over my will, see that it's in order.  You never know.

          When I sit down at my desk and open my journal, the thought nags, what if this is the last time I ever do this?  I'd want there to be something significant, such as how much I love my family, or maybe some eloquent letter to God, as though my last moments had been spent in prayer.  But probably my last written words will be more like, Let's see, I'll need four 2 x 8's, 10 feet long, one 2 x 8, eight feet long, and two pounds of 12-penny nails.  We are all struck down in our prime, amid some project or another.  Who's to say which endeavors are the most important?  Sometimes I wonder if God is even paying attention.  Time to go, buddy.  Oh, I'm sorry, were you in the middle of something?  Only grandmothers know God's Plan in detail, and they aren't likely to tell you anything about it, except that you aren't holding up your end of it very well.

          My last will and testament is just fine, after a few tweaks here and there.  It isn't long, doesn't have to be; I have few assets to haggle over.  It simply instructs the survivors to cremate my remains, and adds that I want my ashes spread around the sumac tree in the front yard.  We don't have a sumac tree in the front yard, but after I finish the new steps up the side of the porch, there will be a right angle around a square of dirt that will be just perfect for one.  This time of year, the sumac leaves turn to fire, a deeper red than even the more well-known sugar maples.  It will be like the ancient Burning Bush, with my ashes seeping into its roots, and blooming like a campfire every year about this time, to remind everyone of the final house repair that finished me off.

          I must stop thinking like this, wondering every time I complete something if that was what God gave me my life to do, and worrying that now that whatever it is is finished, He won't have me breathing up His good air for no reason.

          I published a book of short stories just last June, and thinking like this nearly killed me.  Fortunately, I have medicine for this obsession-- Brie on Wheat Thins washed down with cheap champagne.  A good hangover puts nearly everything in perspective; you may be dying, but what with the nausea and the shits, you don't really give a damn.  A whole summer of reading my stories in bookstores, followed by interminable champagne, and I was ready to roll up my sleeves and do some honest hard labor anyway.  If the porch hadn't caved in, I think I'd have painted the house just to keep my mind off of God and my unfinished manuscript.  Hard work is good for the body, hard work is good for the soul...

          After my morning toast-- and limbering up my back so that I could finally stand erect, I go to the lumber yard and bring home all the lumber I'll need for my midget stairs.  I carry them onto the lawn, set out my Dad's wobbly old saw-horses and begin to measure out sections of two-by-tens for my steps.  As I begin to cut the very first one, the guides on my old skill saw start to wobble, and I cut a very expensive board at the wrong angle.  I've suddenly had enough of that old saw and the long history of frustration it has brought me, and I give it a spinning heave, like a discus thrower.  The dumpster is a good thirty feet down slope though, and I miss it.  It takes me ten minutes to collect the broken skill saw pieces and another half hour trip to the lumber yard to buy a new one.  A man's art is only as good as his tools, they say.  I'm not sure this is true, but I have a dandy new saw, and not much day left.  The whole point of life is to make it through one more day, simple as that.  Soon enough, I won't, and then I'll get to cuss out my dad face to face for not making me a better carpenter, as though it were his fault.

          After I cut the steps to size, I begin the interminable nailing.  The first step is not completely nailed in when I give my right forefinger a fairly solid hammer blow.  I grit my teeth through the first wave of pain, then wrap it with tape to slow the swelling.  The only tape I have handy is duct tape, which through all the years has held almost everything in my life together.  Women use love and loyalty, I think, but men prefer duct tape.  It works poorly on bruised fingers though, and I have to loosen it, and finally take it off and stomp into the house for a real band-aid.

          Hammering nails is like a Zen meditation after awhile:  mark your spot, hold the nail vertical, tap it easily three times so it won't fall when you let go, and so if you miss, you don't mash your fingers, then drive it in up to its little head.  One after another, so simple and pure a motion, the mind lifts completely free of it.  The trick is to keep the mind from wandering off into some shimmering dream-- taut sails above a white-capped sea, the concave curve above a woman's hip-- a band-aid is not nearly enough padding to let the mind wander away from its aim.  After a second hit and three or four more band-aids, I let the mind soar free, but don't let it fill with anything but the crisp fall air, the smell of fresh-cut lumber, and the rhythmic swing of my hammer arm.  The nothingness of it seduces me; I begin a random chant in time with the hammer blows.  Hard work is good for the body, hard work is good for the soul...  It seems like no more than a minute later, all the steps are nailed down, and not a missed swing.  No wonder Jesus chose being a carpenter; I would not be surprised to learn that the Buddha was a carpenter as well.

          I keep up the pace, cutting and nailing the risers, the siding, the trim, until darkness obscures the nail-heads.  I haven't eaten all day, and the caffeine in the cola drinks I've finished has left me with the shakes.  My heart is racing with its bad spark plug again, but I'm breathing strong, my mind is clear, and the steps are in, landing square in the middle of the cement pad, just like I knew what I was doing. "See Dad, I can so work with my hands," I say upwards into an empty sky.  Then I have to sit down on the steps to catch my breath; the twilight coolness chills me under my sweat-soaked shirt.

          My wife comes through the front door, inspects my work, and hands me a sandwich and a soft drink.  "Nice job," she says.

          I nod silently, my mouth full of sandwich.

          "You'll be back to writing soon, looks like," she adds.

          After a pause to swallow, I say, "Can't think about that."

          "Oh, come on, you know you will."

          "I really can't think about my writing.  I don't have time for that.  I may not have time for much of anything," I say.

          My wife gives me the kind of silent look that indicates patience coming to an end.  "By the way, the doctor called.  He wants you to call him," she says.

          "Can't think about that either right now.  Got to get all this painted first.  Then the landscaping done in front of it.  I was thinking of a sumac tree.  What do you think?"

          "I think you ought not put off calling the doctor," she says, looking at my face as though she were checking it for melanoma spots.

          "I meant about the sumac," I say.

          "Fine," she says, but her voice is tight, as though something were pushing up underneath it.  She gets up and goes into the house, and I sit on the steps alone in the last of the twilight, thinking that the steps look right fine, and nothing at all can take this good day away from me.  Each day is precious now because I've gotten to wondering just how many of them I have left.

          To put it bluntly, I'm afraid I'm dying.  I know everybody has to do it sooner or later, but I was hoping for way later; I have several dream vacations planned, and I want to walk my daughter down the aisle at her wedding, when she's thirty-two or so, and wanted to scare the bejesus out of all the boys who will come sniffing around before then.  There are grandkids to hold, and manuscripts to finish.  I have so many promising story starts that have been laid aside, and, well, I just don't get back to projects in time to remember where they were going, and now it may be too late.  Too late for a lot of things, except the flair of living each last day fully. Today I've built stairs, and it was a good day.

          The next morning, I go to the lumber yard and bring back three gallons of paint.  I spend the morning brushing white primer over my previous day's work; when I am done, the pure white steps glisten so brightly in the noon sun, they look like the stairway to heaven, midget version.  I have the rest of the afternoon to putter around with my project, so I lay a pattern of old bricks and leftover cement blocks between the two sets of stairs, with a square hole left in the center for the sumac tree.

          At the local nursery, I find the most beautiful little tree, just a few inches taller than me, its leaves flaming a full, deep red.  I use my credit card to buy it, and think, I'll either pay it off in time, or I'll die and the life insurance will cover it.  Either way, why worry about it today?  I bring it home with its root ball tied onto the open tailgate of my Jeep, and run it up to its new home in the wheelbarrow.  The root ball is heavier than it looks, and after so much exertion, I have to have my wife help me lift it out of the wheelbarrow.  I wait until after she has gone back inside to spit; it is dark again, and my handkerchief comes away yellow-green, with flecks of pink around the edges.  An ugly sign; after I plant the tree, I'll call the doctor.

          I dig a hole for the root ball, and have just lifted the tree into it when my daughter comes home from school. The brilliant crimson of the sumac leaves stops her in a gazelle-like leap halfway up the front stairs.

          "That's a neat little tree, Dad," she says with a pop of her gum.

          "I like it too," I say, standing back to admire it.  "You know what?  I think I'd like my ashes spread around it when I die," I say absentmindedly.

          I hear a gasp, and my daughter's mouth drops open so far her gum falls out, but she doesn’t pick it up.  Instead, she runs into the house.  I can hear a loud "Mom!" echoing out the screen door, just as it slams shut.

          I've almost gotten the root-ball covered by the time my wife comes out, tight-lipped and eyes narrowed.  She stands at the top of the new stairs, glaring down at me.  I don’t look up at her until I have patted the dirt down all around the new tree, and begin watering it.

          "That was a stupid thing to say," she says.  "Just short of mean.  You know how sensitive she is about things like that.  What is the matter with you?"     She has her hands on her waist, and is all puffed up like a mother goose protecting its young, and not a force to trifle with.

          I know I'll have to answer sooner or later, but I have no idea how.  "I think I'm dying," I say.

          "That is so much hog poop," she says, exceptionally strong language for a New Age Unitarian who chants mantras as the sun comes up.  "The doctor called again.  He says you probably have a case of mild bronchitis. He wants to prescribe some antibiotics, but you have to call him first.  You are not dying.  You're just looking for an excuse to fail.  What is it you can't face?"  She sighs loudly, to be sure I'll hear it.  "Whatever it is, don't you dare take it out on us.  I'm going to have to make tollhouse cookies now, even though I wasn't planning to."  She spins like a dancer and stomps into the house.

          I stand with the hose in my hand, like a man caught taking a piss in the front lawn.  Suddenly it is embarrassing to be holding that piddling stream, and I shut it off and hang up the loops of hose.  Bronchitis, the doctor says.  Mild bronchitis.  A week of Ampicillin, and I'll be good as new.  Well, not brand new; there's the back pain and that heart skipping thing.  Damn, I’m still healthy enough I'd have to apologize, and probably buy special snacks and little appeasements for the women in the house.  Can’t they see I am too busy to think straight?  Today is winding down, and tomorrow, I'll have to paint.  Deck and trim, two colors, and it will probably take all day.  And then, the new paint will make the old flaky paint on the front of the house look like shit, and I'll have to paint that too.  I probably won’t be done by the time the rains come, and then we'll be on the brink of the holidays.  I am afraid that by the time I get back to my writing desk, I'll be totally exhausted, broken, and have nothing at all to say.  

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