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When life simply reeked with joy!
Monday, February 10, 2003So this is my day thus far: Along the road, holding up the front bank of my property, is a part stone, part cement retaining wall. The cement part was built by the WPA during the great depression. Because this has been such a heavy (not heh-vy, as in weighty, by hee-vy, as in ground shifty) winter, two sizable chunks of it fell along the road. Not on the road, but still, in a very unconveinant place for drivers. So I managed to get into the Blacksmith shop to get a sledge hammer, and my father and I went down to the road to break these slabs into small enough peices for me to carry off. It was amazing to see the inside of these slabs...the cement in some places had been mixed with sand and coal dust, and so some of the peices now had aged to the point where they looked like sandstone with a star map sprinking of coal. As my father pounded the conglomeration apart, rocks, long ago smoothed into perfect ovals as big as my fist were revealed, like the fossils of some ancheint beast. As I picked up pieces from the black muck of the road, a combination of slush and new snow, salt and cinders and general road filth, I admired one in particular, the two halves of the cement had broken apart to reveal a perfect concave on one side, on the other, a dusty red egg shape. I wondered if I had found something special, the philospher's stone, a mundane egg. Something that a man, half starved, worried about his future and wanting to end the temptation of selling his treasure and having it end up in less than pure hands buried it in a wall in front of a lonely house on a lonely road. I also found an old article in my filing cabinet, and wanted a friend to read it. So I looked it up, just to see if this 1983 article happened to be online. Voila...it is. So, go and read about the time "When Life Reeked With Joy" You'll get a good giggle. http://www.csd.uwo.ca/staff/magi/personal/humour/General_Audience/ When%20Life%20Reeked%20With%20Joy.html Permalink Cindy scribed this at 1:32 PM 0 comments |