Its off to work we go!
Dig dig dig
Sunday was my day off and was spent at my friend Shannon’s house in Ivanhoe. She invited me over for dinner at about four and when I arrived, I was given a shovel. I was going to work for my dinner.
And I loved it.
Dave is a seventy year old retired history academic. He owns the house where Shannon lives. On this fine Sunday, boiling over thirty degrees, he had a mission: an old concrete foundation with bricks underneath where an old shed used to be (Dave’s not sure what happenned to the shed), needed to be stomped and cracked with a long iron crowbar, and dug out of the earth to make way for more of the lovely native plants in his garden.
Shannon, Dave, Anisa and I sweated and toiled for a couple of hours. Dave is a good boss, he set us to our tasks without any hesitation. No hands were idle for the next two hours. I swung the mattock, heaving out the weeds. Anisa collected the weeds into a pile. Shannon was hammering the concrete with the crowbar – well, dropping the crowbar onto the concrete and so I swapped with her and really let the crowbar come down hard on the concrete, picking up the broken pieces as I went (we filled a half dozen buckets) and casting the whole bricks aside for stacking up against the fence. Dave chipped concrete off the bricks.
We stopped for beers and sat in the backyard. Dave quoted poetry which sounds kinda corny but it wasn’t. After beers, Dave and I filled in the hole we’d excavated. The girls cooked pizza and brought out more beers and olives and crackers and cheese and those rolls wrapped in vine leaves which I forget what they’re called. Dave cracked upon a red. We sat in the backyard eating and talking and drinking until the mosquitoes drove us inside.
Anisa’s Tip: white vinegar stops the mosquito bites from swelling.
We went inside and ate dessert. Dave’s own alcoholic fruit salad with crushed nuts, port and brandy as well as the normal array of fruits in salad. Anisa bought choc mint Ice Magic. Dinner conversation ranged broadly from Sri Lankan call girls to Sopranoes, genocide and Facebook.
Dave drove me to the bustop at about nine. I thanked him for his kindly hospitality. I dug the whole bonding experience. This is what a Sunday, a holy day, can be about. Getting into the earth, hands and feet dirty, sweating and then enjoying the fruits of our collective labours, having achieved our (primary) objective, we had beer and pizza – all in all, it was exactly what I needed to take my mind away from the troubles back in Brunswick. I look forward to going back soon. Dave has a property out near Warrandyte, a hut he built himself with no electricity, down by the river. He said I was welcome to come and check it out one day. I’d like to take him up on the offer.
