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By jwb71913 Date: 2005 Jul 13 Comment on this Work [[2005.07.13.21.41.6325]] |
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He woke at dawn and picked up his bag at the site. Another day, another ninety bucks before taxes, with two thousand five hundred trees to plant before he could have another soak in the tub and a cold beer. Home seemed a very long way away, almost a memory, but a sweet reminder and a good distraction as he leaned into the hot wind and worked his noodle to plant the young pines. He remembered planting bat wing begonias and hydrangea with his sweetheart in the beds back home, and wondered if the fickle rain of summer and the ample horseshit was helping them while he was away. The noodle strained as he walked, the muscles of his back and shoulders screamed at each point in the row. When he got tired he just took a quick glance back and saw the fledgling forest he had planted which would rise from the barren clay and thrive with the spring rains. "I am making something, and that is a difference from nothing", he reminded himself as he paused to urinate on the young saplings. "This is good, and this is right." He thought only of his woman in the nights, and had no strength to fantasize or even to spare a stray thought. Gone were the days of idle chatter, the lifeless days and empty nights (though filled with brazen and footloose women they may have been), the horrors of the next days' bleary-eyed discovery of vomit and god knows what kind of DNA on the sheets. Gone also was the empty despair, so long a part of his life that it became invisible until it was gone. Gone was the shell-shocked and shattered heart, for he felt so full of love he sometimes burst into an almost insane laughter, remembering a twist of word, an insane moment, when he and she felt such uncontrollable happiness that they both became insane with moronic laughter. He so loved to laugh with her and she with him. They had found each other and had given all that was left of their shattered hearts. Life was good. |