paint

My Cinderella story for today involves drudgery, heat, the buzz of nasty horseflies, stretching on a tipsy ladder to reach high places, cursing as splashes of paint fall to the brick floor (white splashes look awful on red brick)).

By noon I’d been at it for five hours. My hands, shoulders, legs are splattered, smudged and dabbed with paint.

Time for the great transformation. Step number one: the shower. No, not at the farmhouse. That’s a clean shower stall. You have to preclean yourself to go there. To Ed’s sheepshed then. Where nothing is too dirty to set loose in the tub.

Step two: don the frock, put on dangly earrings, take out the sandals with the silver straps and off you go, to the ball.

Not the ball really – just a reception for the new dean at the Law School, but my oh my do it feel like I am stepping into a different world.

Driving home, I think how nice it is to move from the world of laborious work to dainty cookies and lemonade and quiet chatter about this and that. And then, how nice it is to come back to the farmhouse, even though the porch is only half painted and the horseflies are up and buzzing and it looks like screening the damn thing will take many many many days of work.





Now, have I mentioned how wonderful it will be to have a place to sit outside without the bugs? Yes? I have? Okay, well let me not be too repetitive.