...a new fence and some old memories...

These are some images of preparation for the new fence. The first pic, which reminds me a bit of a poppy field, is of some of the zillion flags planted last week by the cable and phone company, both of whom are taking no chances this time around. They'd flagged their lines before I had the pool removed, but as the lines were cut anyway, they apparently decided to err on the side of caution this time. Nevertheless, if I were a betting woman, which I'm not, I wouldn't give odds of more than 50% that some lines won't be cut again...it seems to be the nature of the business.





The second pic is Leo, supervising the workers, and maybe spraying a little "eau de Leo" on the posts, just because he can...






The third pic, of the wooden post, looks like nothing, I know, but I have to admit I teared up a little, looking at that post...because it's the last of the posts that my Dad put in, over 20 years ago.













In April 1987, when Mike and Chris were just 20 months old, my Dad, recently widowed, took the train from Wisconsin to visit us. Dad was then 83, and considering the amount of alcohol he'd consumed in his lifetime, his liver should have been the size of Manhattan, and add to that the number of truly bad cigars he'd smoked, you would have thought he'd have emphysema...but in spite of those facts, he still enjoyed excellent, robust health (and looked considerably younger than his years...see pic). He could not abide being idle, and he must have been here for all of a day when he said that it hadn't escaped his notice that our fence needed some repairs, and if it was OK, he'd just as soon replace a few of the posts.

I bought a post hole digger, and he paced himself, and he ended up replacing 6 of them, I believe. 20 years later, a strong wind could have taken out most of my fence...and a summer storm did exactly that to about 12 feet of it last July...but those 6 posts remained firmly upright, and, thanks to the way he'd seated them in the concrete, none of them had rotted at the base...
so I found myself smiling, this afternoon, to see that the wrecking crew had to take sledgehammers and saws to those 6 posts, and then had to dig the concrete bases out of the ground.

I loved that, and Dad would have loved that too...