The Grim Reaper

The Halloween decorations I have seen around town have ranged from a few pumpkins on the porch (mine) to some pretty full blown, all out designs. I've decided to start a series of ones that catch my eye. The grim reaper is in front of a house we pass regularly. The house was owned by a bank which did nothing with it for years, but it has finally been purchased, fixed up and occupied. This is but one of the displays in front of the house. Perhaps demons that have been exorcised from the house but didn't get far?

The saga of the rocks (John insists it isn't a saga) continued yesterday when my neighbor called to me when she saw Spike and me poking around the field looking for large ones. She gave me a tour of their house which is  nearing completion on the inside. It is very similar to the one that burned down, save for some design and code upgrades. It has higher ceilings, and slightly bigger rooms because they eliminated the fireplace and cantilevered the second story out a foot or so. It has vents that automatically close off when they reach a certain high heat to prevent embers from entering the house. We might look into those ourselves. 

Their goal is to concentrate on finishing the house so that they can move in before Christmas, and then to start working on the landscaping. As we stood in front of their house chatting about this and that I spotted what looked like a really good rock, still charred from where it has rested on a burned fencepost for over two years. I commented on it, telling her about our little project, and she told me I could have it, and anything else I saw lying around outside...tools, mulch or dirt from the piles outside our bedroom or logs from the eucalyptus trees that were cut down months ago. She apologized to us, and seemed genuinely sympathetic for the noise of construction. They are going to move the dirt pile to level a corner of the lot for her studio. That will be noisy, especially when they separate out the rocks from the soil, but the end is in sight and it will be nice to have them back as neighbors again.

I don't think we want any part of the eucalyptus mulch (we had enough blown all over our house and garden by the cowboys who cut them down and put the branches through a chipper pointed straight at our house) or the logs, but we did go down there with our hand cart and strap and take the rock. We got it onto the cart and pushed (me) and pulled (John) it halfway up the driveway where we laid it down for a rest. For us, not the rock. When we got the cart upright again, it wouldn't budge. One tire was going flat because the rock was resting on it. Once readjusted it was much easier to push/pull it the rest of the way to the front steps. There we met out match. It is now standing in the driveway, still strapped to the hand cart until we can get Gustavo back to move it up the front steps and into place at the top.*

It was one of our more remarkable feats of cooperation, accomplished without killing each other or getting killed by the rock. It doesn't look that big, and we are admittedly not as strong as we might have been once, but we were so concentrated on our efforts that not even any bad words escaped us. 

Changing from a lemon tree which had outgrown its space, and some out of control streletzias which were trying to push it further out, to rocks and gravel is a big enough change that the choice of rocks and their placement is taking on greater importance, but, like people, every rock has a story....

*extra