On The Road

 

  It's fall, a good time to travel. We've never been to Italy. The Romans built roads that lead there so we hopped on a modern extension of one of them. We started from home in northwest Minnesota and headed south and east. Our first stop would be in Delaware where Teresa's niece Abigail lives. We would also spend time in Annapolis, Maryland where Teresa's sister Cindy lives.

  Cindy owns two art galleries and it's time she cuts back. She's also thinking about selling her house.  We offered to give Cindy's daughter Abigail a couple of day's work to help. Abigail makes her living as an artist, but for the past year she's been helping her mother exclusively.

  Abigail accepted our offer. She said we could help clean out Cindy's garage and the upstairs of one of the galleries. Not knowing what she was asking for, Abigail assigned me some carpentry on the gallery counters. Both of them. 

  Our first work day was in Cindy's garage. She has one of those garages that hasn’t seen a car in twenty years. The climate in Maryland is mild and Cindy's Volvo is tough. As she passes from the driveway to the house, the garage is the perfect place to drop anything she doesn't want in the house. Over twenty years this has led to layers of stuff that would make any archeologist reach for their pick.

  The garage was originally built for two cars. The first door opens easily because Cindy uses it every day. We needed to open the other door to make a frontal attack on the pile of stuff. The bottom of the door had absorbed moisture and seemed glued to the ground. The handle for lifting the door started pulling away as Abigail lifted on it.

  Teresa and I were able to squeeze between the back side of the door and the mountain of stuff. Why was the door so heavy and why wouldn't it stay up? Ah, the cable attaching the door to the overhead spring had come off its wheel. We'll fix that later. For now a block of wood would hold the door up

  Just inside the door by the wall were four large chunks of concrete from Maryland's ancient Liberty Tree. As this famous tree started to decay over the centuries, concrete was poured into the center of the trunk to hold it up. When the tree finally went down, Abigail's father, Gardner, had these four pieces of concrete hauled to his garage as potentially valuable historical artifacts. 

  Abigail decided the artifacts would be safe in the woody ravine behind the house. We roped the first chunk onto a dolly and Abigail's boys, Max (15) and Roman (13), carefully transported it to the ravine. I said what we needed was a wheelbarrow. Teresa could see the tip of a wheelbarrow in the middle of the pile. After some digging we had our wheelbarrow.

  We loaded the second chunk of concrete into the wheelbarrow, but it was no go. Flat tire. We transferred the chunk into a small wagon. Even though the rubber tire was coming off one of the wheels, the wagon was better than the dolly. Now I wished we had a tire pump. Presto! A brand new pump appeared, still in the box. The wheelbarrow tire held air and off the third chunk went to the ravine. The pile had the magic power to produce anything we might need to get rid of the pile itself

  The final chunk weighed close to 200 pounds. We were relieved when Cindy suggested we turn the chunk into a Liberty Tree lawn ornament. Several of us dragged the chunk out onto the garage apron and tipped it down a short drop-off where it may sit another couple of hundred years.

Give me liberty!

  Now it was time to tackle the garage's toxic waste site. A large bag of garden fertilizer along the wall had tipped over and the contents had eaten through the base of an antique fire extinguisher and several paint cans. The contents had oozed out, creating a replica of a science fiction movie creature. We put the dripping cans into plastic bags, then into totes in our vehicles. Roman found a hammer and chisel and removed the Blob from the floor.

  Our plan was to haul the stuff in the garage out onto the lawn into two piles: good stuff for the estate sale and junk for the landfill. There ended up being a third pile of boating equipment: sails, lines, cushions, barometers, etc. Gardner owned a sailboat with a friend. The boat's location was vague. The boat's other owner was elderly and had supposedly given his interest to Gardner. Abigail didn't care about the boat. She just wanted the garage empty. Gardner was busy on a long-term project in Canada and had authorized Abigail to take care of business.

  The pile of boat stuff grew larger than the estate sale and junk piles together. By the time both vehicles were loaded with junk, Abigail discovered that the local landfills would be closed before we could reach them. Our option was to haul the junk to the gallery twenty minutes away that had a dumpster. It was a small dumpster with a monthly pick up. The extra junk could go behind the gallery, and Abigail would deliver the toxic waste to the landfill another day.

  Meanwhile I was sent to cut into the shelf under the front counter in the gallery. When staff sat at the computer, they couldn't get their legs under the counter and they didn't like it. Before our trip I had consulted with my brother, a competent carpenter. Of course reality never matches the ideal. I made a tentative cut into the plywood shelf. Sarah, the employee, suggested I cut out more and remove that support post she hit her knees on. With Abigail's ok I cut out the post and more of the shelf.

  Finally Abigail unleashed me for a deep squarish cut. The sawdust flew and blue smoke drifted up as my jig saw turned the corners. "Smells good in here," Abigail said. Abigail is such a positive person. That's the reason we love working for her.

  It was getting dark by now. Abigail called back to Cindy's and asked the crew there to put the good stuff back in the garage. When we arrived it looked like we had barely made a dent in the pile. This would be a job of many days. But it was satisfying to know that the legacy of the Liberty Tree was safe, the former toxic waste site was clean, and the  gallery workers’s backs would no longer be twisted.

Ergonomically correct