Published: October 15, 2008 06:10 pm            

Getting ready for winter

Time to do that end-of-summer thing. You know, where I crow about my summer achievements and try to make light of the stuff I didn’t get done.

Let’s start with the house. I finally replaced the storm door to the studio. When I first built the studio — part of The Project, that Never-to-be-Completed addition to my house — I took the old aluminum storm door from the kitchen and put it on the studio.

The problem with that was that storm door should have been thrown away when we took it off the kitchen door. It had been the most used door in the house since the place was built more than four decades ago. It was warped, the hinges were sprung and the latch had stopped working about the time Richard Nixon was elected to the presidency.

But, it was free. And since The Project had exceeded not only its projected six month time line by more than five years, but also its budget by some exponential number I have mercifully since forgotten, I was happy to economize on the studio storm door. That way, whenever my wife would shake her head about how much money we spent on The Project, I could point with pride to the studio storm door.

So, for the next three years we were treated to a door that rattled every time the wind came up, and which frequently blew open and banged like a demented drummer, usually around three o’clock in the morning.

The new door is a thing of beauty; white with brass trim and a quiet, solid way of closing that reminds me of a Rolls-Royce. I once visited the local Rolls dealer and was utterly impressed by the sound those car doors make.

My new door also has a pull-down storm window. And when you pull it down, it automatically unrolls the screen. Every once in a while I walk over to the door and lower the glass two or three times, just for fun. And even after six months I still find an excuse several times a day to open the door just to listen to it close.

I also got the screen door for the back porch fixed. Sometime during the previous fall season my dog Brutie had charged through the screen in pursuit of a squirrel. Since we were ready to shut the porch up for the winter anyway, I simply took the screen off and set it aside to fix later.

Naturally, by the time spring rolled around, I had forgotten where I had put it, and it wasn’t until the closed-up porch got hot enough to bake pizza that I conducted a wall-to-wall search and finally unearthed it in the storage lean-to at the side of the house. It was hidden under the tarps I use when I rake leaves.

Of course, that’s pretty much how everything gets lost at our house. Any flat surface is a prime target for temporary storage. Finding something is like an archeological dig. “Hey, I just found the missing scissors buried in the Paleozoic layer.”

Landscaping was a definite achievement this summer. I have my daughter to thank for that. She came for a two-week visit in June and brought her gardening tools with her. She is in the process of getting her Master Gardener certification, and I guess she saw the jungle-like quality of my yard as a suitable opportunity to earn special credits. For long days I followed her around, digging border trenches, hauling mulch and pruning everything that didn’t move.

Speaking of mulch, I also rented a wood chipper and ground up my haystack-size pile of dead branches into an equally large pile of mulch. Not only did this fill the need for mulch for the next millennium, but, of course, it made room for next winter’s accumulation of dead branches. There is a price to pay for having a yard full of mature trees.

I also put down a ton or so of lawn fertilizer, spread enough grass seed to reseed a golf course, planted flower beds, put together a gazillion hanging baskets, turned a couple of old bi-fold doors into planter panels for the patio, installed cabinets in my work shop, and put another 12,000 miles on my lawn mower.

Sure, there were a few things that didn’t get done. The pond and waterfall, for instance. Several times I was ready to start digging only to be put on hold in favor of doing something else more pressing. Weeds, for example. This summer the weeds came with an attitude. They showed up under cover of darkness and turned my pristine brick sidewalk into a jungle in a matter of hours. Ditto the brick patio at the back of the house. We have a well, so I dig weeds with a knife rather than spraying herbicides.

I also didn’t get the new fence built. Plus, the brick chimney needs to be rebuilt to stem the persistent leak when it rains. But since I don’t hear anyone volunteering to do these things for me, I guess they will still be waiting for me next spring.

In the meantime, I need to get ready to rake leaves again. If I can only remember where I put the tarps.

Ward Degler is a Zionsville writer and artist. E-mail him at wdegler@att.net.

        

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