jolie laide: Breaking Up is Hard to Do

jolie laide

I started this when I lived in Brooklyn and struggled for grace in a city that grants moments of beauty and ugliness breathtakingly close to one another. Now I live in a place where things are a different kind of ugly and the beauty is pedestrian. I struggle with that.

4.09.2006

Breaking Up is Hard to Do

With spring emerging all around me I keep dreaming of my old house. That tiny garden was hard won, but in the end brought me oh so many lettuces, strawberries, lilies, saffron, daffodils, the droning of bees slowly cruising heavy with pollen, the dart and call of fireflies amongst the flowering vines. So finally, with a warm weekend day, I am in the back of the new house, in my concrete un-garden, taking stock.

Taking stock with my sledge hammer, that is. I begin dismantling the low wall. It feels good to heft the sledge, let gravity pull it downward, gaining velocity until it hits the wall with a solid thump and chips of brick flying, a fissure starts, a brick moves. Sometimes a single brick comes loose, sometimes a chunk of eight or more, which I set on the ground and beat into more manageable hunks.

I continue until I have enough rubble to fill the 10 contractor’s bags I bought earlier. That’s all the work I will do today, just one small step. Sack it up, 10 bags at 50-60 pounds each, and that’s a quarter-ton of smashed brick and concrete to haul up the ladder, through the house, down the front steps, to the curb. I will have to do this twice more to get that wall down. Another 8 or ten times to remove the remaining walls. Countless numbers of times to remove the 2 inch concrete pad that covers the entire back.

There will be no garden this year, but, I hope, a gradually emerging idea of what can be, as I break it apart piece by piece.

2 Comments:

Blogger famjaztique said...

You should make yourself a "patio" garden in the meantime. Fill up window boxes with lettuce, and pots with flowers, herbs, tomatoes, peppers, and other scrumptious stuff. This will give you pleasure while you tear down the concrete to make way for your future garden.

4:33 PM  
Blogger ttractor said...

that is such a good idea! I have set out in the front my rescued strawberries from the little house, a lavendar that I nearly dispaired to death this winter and a bog plant whose name I can't remember. But I didn't even think about stocking up the back! Duh! Thank you!

11:14 PM  

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