Down from the Roof into the Garden

6-10 May 10, Boise

Coupeau, a roofer who occupied a 10-franc room on the top floor, had his tool bag on his back . . . “Say, what weather this is for May! It's biting cold this morning.”

– Emile Zola's L'Assomoir

Six am; the thermostat reads twenty-nine degrees as I happen to read this passage in Zola's novel and start at the coincidence; a little cozy reading before I go out into the cold to work on the roof and install siding on the neighbor's place. It's damn cold; how dearly I'd rather be reading about Coupeau's toils than have to go out and endure them myself.

It's been a blustery, dramatic spring. Whereas the winter was mild, with snow fall at sixty to eighty percent of normal around the state, its passing has been a convulsive death throe. There was one warm spell in March, but since then the weather has been at turns frigidly blue or stormy wet, providing only a handful of days warm enough to go out without a coat. The lilacs have bloomed early, their cones of purple and ivory held in the air pertinaciously as hail lashes down from torn skies. But if this sounds like a complaint, it's not. Yesterday, two stories up on scaffolding, I looked out over the greening trees at the tall white islands of cumulus drifting across the turquoise sky, the clouds shining and coved with shadow, the ranks of them going on as far as you could imagine to the west and possibly even to the sea. This last week our weather has arrived from Alaska, the chilled currents whipsawed down here by the jet stream.

A new friend of mine, M.L., who owns a modern furniture store here, loves the weather. He's from Boise and is accustomed to the usual warmer, more gradual springs. Yet being a gardener, he likes what this prolonged cool spell is doing to his garden. “The roots really get a chance to sink in, establish themselves, before the heat comes on.” I don't know much about that. I do know my hands are rough and split and the mornings require a hat, down vest, jacket and shell to keep the breezy cold from paralysing me up on the scaffolding. And that I'd rather be inside reading. But that's often my plight, regardless the weather.

And I know the Boise river is flowing high, nearly bank-full, though not as high as last spring. And if you go to the farmer's market on Saturday morning all you'll find for produce are hot-house varieties and starters and herbs. But most of the shade trees are in leaf now, their green a bright new shade that should darken in the coming weeks. Only the catalpas and sycamores in town and the alders and willows in the hills are holdouts. The warmth will come. And then the hard-driving heat. And hopefully by then we'll be inside doing the finish carpentry on the house.

- - - - - -

Yesterday we were the picture of domestic pastoral bliss: me mowing the lawn that had grown tall as alfalfa in the front yard, Anna pulling weeds from the flower beds and sweeping clean the sidewalk as Ada toddled about the mown portion of the yard, pushing up on three points while trying to put a stick in her mouth. The clouds had broken and the warm breeze tossed white shreds across the blue sky while we worked contentedly outside for an hour or so. I was tired from work, but nothing like a cold beer and a kiss from the wife to give you your pep back.

Going round the yard, ducking under the thick-leaved maple trees, watching Anna sweep, her fine brown arms showing from her blouse, glancing over to be sure Ada wasn't getting into trouble, I had the thought: “wow, we're Boiseans now. We're playing house and tending the yard and I've got a steady job and Anna has her routine and has found her way about town and it could be 1950, or even farther back, if it weren't for the cars passing on the street, and we're a little pioneer family settling the outskirts of the new town on the edge of the Rockies.” Or something a little silly like that. All we needed was a cow in her stall and chickens floating about the yard. (The neighbors do have chickens, by the way.)

There was such a serene and industrious pleasure in our all being at work together. I think that's my single greatest complaint about having a job: spending eight-plus hours a day with people who aren't my family, aren't even good friends. Certainly working with family has it's strains and dangers. But Anna and I work well together. We've got similarly proportioned senses of industry, completeness, aesthetics. . . and we've talked about going into business together. The field that keeps popping up is interior design. Anna with her artistic and design and color-consultant skills; me with my building, electrical and lighting and cabinet installing abilities, and my own decent eye for design. We might have something there.

Last weekend we went to the Boise Green Expo, where we made some good contacts that could provide a means of getting Anna more experience with interior design. Anna's big worry is that neither of us have any business sense: we're not coin-chasing capitalists, or even small-business savvy in the least. Of course that's key. But I think we've got something more than that. We've got taste. And the schooling and experience to back up that taste. And that's something most business types don't have. You see proof of it everyday here with poorly laid-out or decorated stores and shops (faux finish! faux finish!) and houses that cost half a million but look like they hatched right out of the suburbs. There are some good designers here, certainly. The question is whether there's enough demand to go around for them and ourselves, the new couple in town, looking like a pair of hayseeds in our front yard working away until the sky goes pink in the west and Ada starts to get fussy for dinner. We're all pioneers in some way or another, when you start out at something new.