Here are the photos that wouldn’t upload yesterday. Not great, but remember that in the old days I could stealthly take pictures inside shops given the small size of my digital camera. Now I’ve the photographic equivalent of the Browning Automatic Rifle.

It’s time to find our son and bring him home.

**************

Emma’s palm trees.

These girls put up with my incessant picture taking, but sometimes Emma draws the line.

**************

Thursday night we met friends to see the Edward Hopper exhibit at the MFA.

The front of the barn roof was pretty well trashed, and the back side had been roofed in 1 x stock with gaps, so after the rotted boards were replaced the entire roof was skinned in half inch plywood. Total elapsed time from ladder set-up to the last shingle? About five minutes. Anyway, two days for both roofs.

Next project falls on Matt and Chris’s shoulders. I can’t wait to send them into the basement to cut up the old oil tank.

I sat in my truck, and through the open passenger window, took photo after photo as this blue heron stood motionless. I changed lenses, snapped a few more, and then I turned off my camera and laid it in on the seat. At that moment, the heron plucked a fish from the pond, looked at me, winked, and then flapped those wings like bed sheets and flew away.

When Champagne’s roofed Adam’s house, the crew consisted of Americans in their twenties, but the men who arrived at my house all look like they come from south of our border. I worried that they weren’t legal and that they’d rather I not photograph their faces, but for the sake of the blog, and to update Matt on what’s happening to his house, not to mention the opportunity to record another deep blue New England sky, I snapped away.

It’s funny how small my house looks with six guys swarming over it. By 10 AM the entire roof was stripped, and by the end of the day they’d finished laying maybe three quarters of the roof.

Travis is doing his best to keep me current. It’s a lost cause.

Steven’s house.

Hey, Hilary from Ohio,

As you know, after you all deserted us for your richer much sexier lives as college students, we parents coalesced into a grieving support group to reminisce about our lost youth, and attempt to overcome our despair with shared food and strong spirits. Last Saturday’s tear-dabbing meeting was at Jen’s house, and here are a few photos.

Both your mom and dad cornered and then blanketed me with stories about you. They told me how much you like your new life, the problems created by overactive roommates, and your abandoning of your chant and clap classes for, of all things, science courses. What up wit dat? Your Little Richard imitation in the protest video demonstrated how perfectly suited you are for C&C Classes (formerly called Humming & Holding Hands). They also told me of your initial intent to double major in Environmental Science and Psychology, or was it Environmental Psychology and Daily Drama?

But you weren’t the only topics. We also talked religion, politics and about roadkill.

Here’s Adam:

“At Jen’s recent turn at our chronic, traveling party, held at her new house, we were discussing someone hitting a deer in the area (deer and driver both survived), and I owned up to braking hard for birds in the road and swerving to avoid frogs. I’m a vegetarian pacifist who at home takes bugs back outside (though I’ll cop to some admittedly harsh tendencies towards homo sapiens, anyway), and I once wrote a short poem about roadkill. These pathetic, squashed remains used to traumatize me, though one can be desensitized to most anything (just ask Dubya), and as I passed yet another mangled rodent one day, rather than wallow in piteous revulsion as was once my wont, I had an intellectual satori and phrased a ditty about why it happens, and how not caring portends the death of more than just hapless rodents, marsupials and ungulates.

Dead squirrel. Roadkill. Legs up.
Condemned by the chains of evolution.
Adaptive response, random flight,
defense against the near-ballistic
stoop of raptors.
But not against SUV’s.
Mindless iron momentum does not waver
for a rodent’s hesitant panic.
Nor return to countenance its demise.
Both can learn from this.
Must. ”

Might be the wrong time to say this, but we left Jen’s late and stuffed.

We’re all doing pretty well, here, in Acton. We’re excited that Matthew is coming home for the summer (though we rented his room out to a Chechen separatist taking classes at Lesley College, and will have to house him in the damp basement), and we’re hoping Diane’s back is strong enough to permit her to join me when we haul him and all his goods out of Philly May 8th. When are you coming home?

Besides work work, we’ve been tackling house projects. I’m installing new windows, painting the bedrooms, tiling the kitchen floor, tilling the garden, cleaning out the barn, and I’ve hired the same colorful crew who roofed Adam’s house (those guys’ gauges would’ve made Robby whimper) to do ours, and maybe a local company to pave our driveway. That’s the big ticket item we may not be able to afford, especially since we’re paying Goose and Matt to paint our house. I know, you can’t imagine Matt engaged in that kind of slave labor, but remember he and Goose and Robby did a terrific job on the Grojean’s garage roof three summers ago.

I also had the nettlesome hedges that border our driveway and the street trimmed. In the old days, when they were shorter, that was an easy homeowner job. But now that they provide cover for our peeling house cutting them back requires using a ladder like a Pogo Stick. Climb up, snip, climb down, move the ladder, climb up, snip, climb down, and so it goes. It’s about a day’s job and Goose did them last, two summers ago. I should have hired him again, but I couldn’t wait, and when I found a flyer in my mail box for this landscaping service that advertised everything from sprinkler systems to creating genetically altered rodent resistant broccoli strains, I decided to hire the Vietnamese owner. I figured a crew of guys sliding along zip wires with buzz saws finishing my hedges in the time it takes me to take a bath. That’s why I felt justified in haggling for a cheaper price.

But Tranh showed up two weeks late with a pair of hedge clippers, an electric trimmer that wouldn’t start, and a yellow step ladder. At mid-day, using my Craftsman trimmer, but mostly his hand held clippers, he was nowhere near done. Sympathetic me, I almost stopped my kitchen tiling to help him work. Instead I opted to give him lunch from Idylwidle. That got him through the afternoon, at which point with all his tools scattered on the ground, and all the trimmings piled on our driveway, he hightailed it home promising to return the next day.

Contrary to Diane’s convictions, he did come back, but not the next day. He arrived in the rain and borrowed a pair of my gloves to cleanup the driveway. Yesterday he came back again, this time with his wife and son, but only to retrieve his tools and assure me he’d return another time.

Yesterday, we dropped into Cambridge to see Mike Daisey’s “Invincible Summer” at the American Repertory Theater . Maybe you read about the high school students who walked out on his performance last Saturday. Though attendance was sparse, his performance was quite moving. The saddest thing to me is thinking of those kids who couldn’t tolerate a few four letter words. I wonder how they feel about the School of the Americas.

Write again,

Michael