At Least They're Committed

I’d been digging for a while and D, who fears his shingles are back, worked a little bit on the front yard with me, EBD had helped for a bit then needed to get ready for work. I wasn’t stalled by a lack of energy or enthusiasm; frankly I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. D was sitting on the step looking like he was in pain, I was hacking at the juniper bush stumps with the shovel and I looked up and there they were. Two gifts from God. High school aged boys wondering if they could work on our yard; we could pay them “whatever you decide our work is worth.”

I asked the brothers if they could turn over the garden area in front of the porch: it had the two stumps, that landscaping mesh that you put down before you lay rocks over it covered with mud, rocks and random trash that had blown in over the winter. You bet, they said.

They worked their asses off, proudly showing me each of the stumps they’d uprooted and explaining how they did it. They dug and shoveled and asked questions about how I wanted it done and they leveled the area, which had never been done, and they chatted. They’re doing this for their mom, her disability hasn’t kicked in yet and she needs money. She might have liver cancer, the docs are pretty sure about it. Their grandpa taught them all they know about landscaping. Their grandma was murdered when the older brother was 12.

The older brother smiled and said, “We’ve had kind of a tough life.”

I went into “holocaust mode,” a trick of disassociation I taught myself while interviewing Holocaust survivors.

They are looking forward to college and they want to go to CU. As they sang the praises of each others’ skills and talents I thanked God that they have each other. I kept thanking them for their help and they kept thanking me, “No, you’re helping us, you’re helping us!”

The results were remarkable, and before I allowed myself to hide away to quietly cry at their fate, I paid them $100 for their work so far and made arrangements for them to come back next weekend. I’ll get the bricks for the planter and they can start building it. And that will probably take them two weeks. And after that I want to install really cool, lighted pavers along both sides of the driveway and then there will be work to do landscaping the back yard and then . . .