This is the first in a series I have planned in my head. I wrote it for my wife, she loved it, so I decided to publish it here to see if anyone else likes it. This is my first ever story, comments and suggestions are encouraged. Thanks and enjoy!!
Saturday
It was one of those chilly, gray, and damp October mornings. You know, the kind that make you want to get under a blanket and binge crappy Netflix movies and eat junk food all day? I had been inside for too long, and I felt myself falling into just that type of procrastination if I did not get up and moving soon.
I wandered out to my garage, looking at projects that needed finished, tools that needed cleaned and put away, trying to find something that caught my interest, something to snap me out of this lazy mood. As I contemplated, I strolled around putting things away, a hammer here, a couple of screwdrivers there, putting tools back in their respective drawers in my large toolbox. I was in the back, sweeping up sawdust when a shelf caught my eye. It had all the tools for yard work and maintaining the trees and lawn: saws, pruners, an axe, etc.
This reminded me, we did have a large tree come down in the storm last week. It was one of those violent fall storms that rattle the house and make you feel like it may come crashing down at any moment. When I had gone out to inspect the damage in the morning, I saw we had lost a large part of a three trunked oak that had hit the corner of the shed and fallen across the yard, its uppermost branches stretching out to the pond, cutting the yard in half. The tree was still laying there, and I decided it was about time I cleaned it up.
With a newfound purpose for the day, I climbed on my old tractor with renewed energy, pulling it out of the garage and hooking up to the trailer. I loaded up all the tools I would need for clearing a tree: chainsaw, hand saw, pruners, an axe, splitting wedges, sledgehammer, and my splitting maul. Now that the trailer was loaded, I grabbed a small cooler and headed inside to change into some work clothes.
Inside, I loaded the cooler with a few bottles of water, 3 or 4 beers, and filled it with ice. The yard is too big for me to want to go back to the house every time I got thirsty, so I had better be prepared. Throwing a couple slices of left over pizza on top, I was packed up for the day.
I turned to head up the stairs to the bedroom, pulling my t shirt over my head as I went. I stepped into the room and shut the door, throwing the shirt in the basket, and hooking my thumbs in the waistband of my old gym shorts, I pulled them to the floor. I tossed those in the basket as well and went looking in my dresser for some work jeans. I pulled a pair out and unfolded them. I remembered these jeans. I had bought them because they were on sale, and they were my size, but when I got home to try them on, they were not something I would wear out in public. They were way too tight in the ass and thigh for my liking, and if I was wearing the kind of boxers that lift and hold your junk, well, it made way too much of a bulge at the front where my package strained against the denim. And now, they were worn thin, had a few rips and paint stains on them, so relegated to yard work they were.
As I pulled them up my legs and wiggled my ass to get them up all the way, I caught my reflection in the full-length mirror on the door. I suppose I did look pretty silly doing the pants dance to get dressed. I was never one to admire myself in the mirror, but I did pause to take a second to look. At over 40 years old, I was no longer the muscly hunk of my twenties. Sure, the muscles were still there, but I had put on a few pounds that covered them, and I wasn't as fit as I was in my Marine Corps days. Still, being over six foot tall helped hide the bit of extra weight, and I still had a full head of deep brown hair, and a full brown beard with very little grays. I guess I would say I was happy where I was. Sure, there are things I would change, but if I thought about most of my peers, I didn't have a beer belly, I wasn't balding and I wasn't going gray, so overall, I was content with my physical shape. With my jeans on, I grabbed an old t shirt that was worn just as thin and paint stained to match the jeans I was wearing and headed outside.
I was surprised to see the change in weather since I had gone in. The sun rose higher in the sky, as the time was approaching 11 o'clock, and had burnt through the clouds that gave way and allowed it to dry the morning dew from the grass. Once again, I climbed on my tractor and drove out back. At three acres, our property isn't overly large. It's more than many people have, but what makes ours unique is its layout. Being only 200 feet wide, the end of the property is 900 feet off the road and 500 feet from the house, coupled with the fact that there is a small hill in the land, you can't see all the way to the back yard from the house, and once you're in the back yard, you can't see the house either.
It was here that I set up my work for the day. I pulled the tractor alongside the tree, unloaded my tools from the trailer and laid them in the grass, checked the chainsaw for gas and bar oil, put in my ear buds and set to work. I took the pruners and cut smaller branches to be drug over to the fire pit to burn. With the fire going, I began using the chainsaw. I cut off larger limbs and cut them up into manageable sizes for firewood. After a couple of hours, I had the branches and limbs stripped clean from the trunk and sorted to be stacked later and in just another half hour, I had the trunk cut into 1-foot sections that I could then split.
While I was working, my mind began to wander as it often does. I drifted back over the years as Snoop sang on about fucking the bitches and smacking the hoes in my earbuds. It's a funny thing to look back on life, and how you got to where you are and the things you've come to accept as normal. It wasn't always like this. 15 years ago, everything was fine, but, as Chris Rock says, the only things loved unconditionally are women, children, and dogs. Men are only valued for what they can do, what they provide. Sure, we started out great, but as the kids came along and adulthood came on, I found myself taking more and more of the backseat. It's kind of painful to look back now and thing about how we went from being partners to me just being a piece of furniture, the live in handy man. "Hey, I need you to fix this," or "The drain is clogged in the bathroom," or "Can you build us that." Never, "How are you feeling, are you happy," "What are some of your ideas, plans and goals that we can work towards." Just rejection and ridicule, overruling and shut down. So, I retreat into the shell of a guy who just goes through the motions and accepts that this is life now. Such is the case for many men my age, I suppose, and I am no different. Oh well. C'est la vie, such is life.
Snapping back to the here and now, I decided that this would be as good of time as any to take a break. I was finished cutting up the tree, so I put the saw and pruners away and piled more branches on the fire. The morning sun had risen, changing from a chilly morning to a warm noon, to now, at 1 o'clock, the sun was beating down an unseasonable heat. My shirt had become drenched with sweat and sawdust as it clung to me like a second skin while I walked to the trailer to grab a beer and a slice of pizza. Looking back at my work as I sipped my beer, the only thing left to do was to split the large tree rounds into firewood. As I surveyed the job at hand, my gaze shifted towards the rows of town homes that were being built next to our property, a mere thirty feet away. She was all pissed off about them building next to us and it ruining our privacy, but it's not like she's ever done anything back there that we'd need to be private about, and in my mind, I didn't care. I was there first. If you look out your window and see me doing God knows what, don't live there and don't be looking. Like I said, I was there first.
It was as I was mindlessly looking up and down the row of houses that I swear I saw some curtains move. I didn't think the townhomes were done yet, and I'm fairly certain no one had moved in. Why were the curtains up? And why did they move? Slightly confused, I decided to ignore it, while also deciding that splitting wood was going to be far too uncomfortable in the soaked through t shirt that was pasted to my torso. Reaching behind my neck with one hand, I pulled the shirt up over my head and tossed it onto the trailer by the cooler. I finished my pizza and downed what was left of my beer, grabbed my splitting wedges and maul, and started to set up for splitting. Out of the corner of my eye, I could swear I saw the curtains move again.
A half hour later, lost in work again, a call of "Hiya!" distracted me. I was mid swing, maul high above my head, and the female voice caught my attention right as I was bringing it down. It glanced off the log, sending the log flying and burying the maul into the earth inches from my foot. Slightly perturbed, I leaned on the handle of the tool and looked over to where this voice came from. There, no more than thirty feet away, on the back patio of the nearest townhome, was a pair of legs holding a ridiculously huge plant. As I continued to stare, the plant lowered itself to the patio and revealed the source of the mystery voice. A beautiful, tall blonde woman was standing there smiling at me.
"You alright?" she asked in a thick London accent. "Huh? Uh, yeah, I'm ok." I replied, not knowing that this was more of a statement than a question from her. I stood for a solid minute, leaning on the handle of the maul buried in the ground, confused, annoyed, tired, and sweaty. I suddenly felt very silly to be out working shirtless wearing those too-tight jeans that no one was supposed to see me in.
