more construction updates

Whorff and company are still blasting (whuffff is the sound!) around the village today. Yet more rock has been discovered to be in the way of the water main. But the weather has been decent, so the dust is not intolerable, and it is not uncomfortable to be only 15 feet from the road, as I am.

The signs to Kandahar, East Beirut, and the Oasis are still up, as is "Camel Crossing" - my own personal sign. But there are signs that the project is beginning to wear on everyone. While most of us have a somewhat passive fatigue over the disruption and we wave, and occasionally feed, the workers who are going as fast as they can, there has been a rumor of "an old lady in a red sports car" who gives the finger to the guys as she drives past every day. Even the guys in the Harbor hardware store had heard the rumor. And then, driving home from the hardware store, whom should I see, but the very same "old lady" in a red MG with the top down, giving the finger to the guys blasting. So she's real and feeling testy as she drives around East Beirut with her top down. I hope she has a garage to put the car in at night.

It has been a beautiful spring except for the construction. The forsythia has been in bloom for at least a month, as have the daffodils, and quince. Driving up river to Damariscotta, yellow clouds of forsythia are like Christmas lights in the gray green gloom of early spring forests. And now finally, it is May and gardens are getting planted, and weeded, and plants are getting swapped for others. Rhubarb is getting stewed, and canned, and there are fiddleheads in Hannaford's. I have been stewing about my barn.

My barn is a "carriage" barn, tall with a big tall door for a dairy wagon, and a hay mow. It was probably built out of scrap from another old barn as there is no post and beam integrity to the structure. But it still smells like hay and old barn. And the whole Northwest corner, really almost half of the barn, has a non-existent or rotten sill. So all the guys are telling me that it should come down and I should build a nice new one, that will do what I want it to do. I have just about decided to do that, but I am writing this down now, to see how it looks in writing, and to see how bad, or good, I feel about it. I have spent a good part of my life helping people save old buildings, or art work, and tearing something down just gives me the willies. But I think that in this community of exquisite ship builders and carpenters, that I can let them do their thing, and give me something that will be truly mine.

Then I will have a place to put my car, when, and ever if, I should be so testy that I need to give construction workers the finger as I drive by. As they say in California, NOT!