My Russian neighbor shakes his head. Too much work around here to do. Someday all this will fall in anyway, he says. I think he is musing over his own situation more than mine. He's in his 70's now and his own hillside, a big struggle with bushes and vines, and small trees, gets harder to maintain every year. And the shed we loaned him needs a new door, this one deteriorating, unpaintable and holey. Some critter got in there this week, I put a flower pot over the hole. It will be all right for now. Unless it is dead in there.
I looked around and got a bit solemn today when I realized the real maintenance man around here, my father has been gone now 14 years. He designed the greenhouse which rests on what looks like sawed in half phone poles butted up against each other; the bottom part buried in the ground and the top one right at ground level so that the place actually could shift some. But, as evidence of the shifting bricks on the floor, and a few windows that won't close on the "bottom hill" side, I see that something has to give, sooner or later. I hope it is much later.
A greenhouse doesn't really need a phone, but dad had wire buried in the ground and an outlet installed way up here. You can still plug in a phone and use it. A huge industrial fan at one time blew the hot air out the top window with metal slats. I am pretty sure he salvaged it from a grocery store that was demolished years ago. You can still plug that thing in too. It's terribly heavy and I wonder who he recruited to hoist it up there and secure it. It's still up there. I hope it doesn't fall on my head someday.
That's it for now. Coffee is cold. I'm going to go get started.
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