My miniature shingled cottage sits unfinished –– without him it wasn't much fun –– but Daddo and I used his power planer to make itty-bitty hardwood floors, and we constructed nifty little jigs and clamps scaled to handle the delicate woodwork of the house. He helped me fabricate plaster fieldstones for the chimney. We had a ball. At one point, when I had decided to scoot the dormer windows of the cottage a fraction closer together, Daddo looked at me and said, "You're going to make a contractor tear out his hair." Not exactly a life goal, but... I like to think I know my mind, but the thing is, it's hard to visualize construction until it's up... We returned to the Would-Be Farm in June and were not disappointed to see progress. The trusty stone-quarry guy had installed a nice gravel driveway right up to the build, including culverts and a sweet level parking area that will be ideal for our friends with motorhomes. And by the beard of mighty Hephaestus himself, the contractor and his gang were busily putting in trusses.
Ahhh. Trusses. With trusses, a girl can visualize what the place is going to look like...
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I posted this blog back in March of 2017. How I wish it were not still apropos. I was tootling along in my innocuous Honda minivan, possibly singing, when my life flashed in front of my eyes. As it does. A montage of really good stuff, actually. Kind of like the Sports Center Highlights Reel, only the soundtrack wasn't great: just my own voice, repeating a filthy variant of "Oh, fiddlesticks!"  On a sunny morning on the Lee Roy Selmon Expressway, a late-model muscle-car –– a Shelby or a Mustang (my apologies for blasphemy to the car-guys still reading after three paragraphs) –– almost smoked his tires stopping by the side of the road ahead in the distance. Flinging open his door, the driver jumped out and assumed the classic shooter's stance: dominant arm outstretched, holding, with the other supporting, legs square, eye to the sight. The tiny, deadly, dark circle of muzzle pointing at me. It's a testimony to hundreds of thousands of years of evolution that adrenaline hits the system quicker than the brain can process the need for it. I was already ducking a little (as if my steering wheel would offer any real cover!) before the thought of how fiddlestickingly stupid this was as a way to go: death by sniper. Adrenaline grants the sensation of time dilation. My irritability about gun culture was accompanied almost simultaneously by a fleeting regret about the very LONG list of things left that I'd hoped to accomplish. And the lightning-flash reel of life highlights. And then, quicker than a blink, I processed the shooter's details: a fit man in a tan uniform, sunglasses hiding half of his dark face, the light shining off what I really, really hoped was a lawman's badge. I hoped that he wasn't a man in the grips of mental illness, uniform or no. And then, the last thing I recognized: the hair-dryer shape of a radar gun. Half of South Tampa passed before my heart stopped racing like a rabbit.
Still, that dark barrel? Pointing my way? Felt like doom only temporarily averted.
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