When your house is involved in a motor vehicle accident… make lemonade.
Last spring a truck hit my house: bad truck. The post that got dislodged was rotten—bad post—and needed to go anyway. Fortunately the couple inside the truck were builders, and good people.
It was like the time my good friend Elyse St. George was accepting a big provincial honour on behalf of herself and the dear departed Ann Szumigalski. It was the screaming dead of winter in Saskatchewan—wind and ice and minus 25—and Elyse had taken the wonderful witchy twisted cane that Ann had given her to represent Ann’s physical presence. After the ceremony, Elyse, then in her mid-eighties and on the long waiting list for a hip replacement, took her first step out the building, and wham!
A shattered hip. But also a shattered waiting list.
As if Ann’s naughty spirit was drifting with the snow, and given that cane a swift kick, then picked it up and waved her magic wand.
In two days, Elyse had her new hip.
In two days, I bought a new post for my carport, and the good people put it in.
And then I had the good bit of the old post to mess around with, getting to know my power tools all over again—and it’s a good landing if you come away with all your fingers. I tarred and sank the post where it could hold the patio lights, then attached the former crown antlers of the plum tree that I’d pruned off in the winter.
It’s some pretty strange lemonade when life gives you a lemon… when your house is in a motor vehicle accident.
It’s what got me started expanding on my making. I write books, and do art, revise clothes, etcetera, but my father was a dyslexic farmer-inventor who could turn cars into trucks and build machines from scratch.
In trying to emulate him, I’m having even more fun.
Revisionary 