Sunday, April 08, 2018

Ground Floor

I can see the floor of my garage. You could too if you happened to drop by. I would be happy to show it to you. When Spring Break began, this was not the case. It had not been the case for some time before Spring Break began. Why this sudden change of floor? No real secret. Opportunity, motive and means.
Instead of spending any more time walking past the garage and not wanting to peer inside on the off chance that I would physically sense the clutter. I took the opportunity to get up one morning and make it less likely that I would feel that crush. I checked my schedule: nothing to keep me from spending some quality time with the debris.
Motive? The voice inside my head competed with the voices around me. No one needed to say anything, but they did. Mostly supportive but pretty direct. The judgment comes from me, I know. So many other garages, up and down our street. In our city. Across this great land of ours. Let's be honest: isn't there a pile of hubcaps in all of them?
Okay. The hubcap pile may be limited to those who have children who harbored some misguided belief that they would act as seeds that might someday sprout into cars all on their own. But only if they were properly watered and fertilized over painstaking periods instead of shoved in bags after being hung on a fence for six years.
And then there's the reality that brought the wheels to his real car to sit there in the garage. Maybe they were magic beans after all.
The means I used were the bare hands. And a ladder. And a broom. And a garbage can. And a recycling bin. And a few hours. Picking things up and putting them in some semblance of order. All those mostly empty cans of spray paint have to be gathered together, waiting for some project that would require a rainbow of some indefinite proportion. Power tools that have been without power for many moons have to be reckoned with. Mostly every item needed to be picked up and moved someplace other than the floor. Now, if I had  a mind to, I could  park a car in there. In case one just happens to spring up through that  nice clean floor.

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