Yesterday was supposed to be the start of a three day storm
that any self-respecting New Englander recognizes as a Nor’Easter. Mysteriously the storm failed to arrive as scheduled
in Central New England and we were afforded one more day of nice, if a little
brisk, weather. This permitted my wife
to exit the house and work in the yard; probably one of her last forays outside
before she goes into winter air lock living mode. (you can take the girl out of
the tropics but etc. etc.)
Her vast and ever expanding flower gardens suffered some
serious body blows over the past few days of frost and she decided to go all “scorched
earth” on them in preparation for winter. This led to a robust series of debris
piles strewn along the fringe of the gardens with my name appropriately attached
to removal duties.
I could have taken the easy route and lugged it all back to the
wood line but why do that when you possess motorized equipment. In addition to picking up leaves I’ve found
the lawn mower is an excellent renderer of garden debris (and it’s kind of
sneaky fun). The attendant frustration,
not to mention body aches, of pushing a lawn mower for several decades led to
an almost childlike glee of operating my riding lawn mower (alright there’s no “almost”
involved).
The best part of the evening though was hanging out with my
wife doing the chores. For some reason
she wasn’t as involved this summer with her gardens and more to the point we
had very few free weekends to spend together out in the yard. We found last night that we both missed it
and enjoyed this brief episode of shared effort (the tractor helped a
lot).
It was kind of sad to see her verdant garden which overflowed
with color for the entire summer reduced.
It’s part of the normal descent towards the stark reality of a New
England winter but I underestimated how much I enjoyed pulling up the driveway
each day greeted by all that color.
 |
| Denuded Garden |
We declared victory and got ready for date night because all
of our efforts to actually speak with our daughter in the law – the fabulous
AFBA were thwarted. I’m sure our son had
something to do with that –treating her to the day she deserved. We did inflict our singing voices on her
answering machine as a small bit of revenge.
Date night called for a movie (of all things) and we were
lucky enough to see Fury. This is a Brad
Pitt vehicle set in the last days of World War 2 with Pitt as a tank commander fighting
his way across the remnants of the 3rd Reich. He and the rest of his veteran crew take on a
fresh-faced newcomer, Logan Lerman, to replace a dead comrade. The movie boasts some truly amazing battle scenes
where some obvious effort went into realism.
The movie is more about the loss of humanity of the veteran
crew (all excellent actors) caused by years of war. You see Pitt trying to hang onto the last vestiges
of his own humanity when he sees himself reflected back in Lerman’s reactions. Despite their fragile existence living on the
edge of barely retained sanity, fighting together establishes a bond that excuses
their descent to a certain degree. A really
well done war movie, brutal to the extreme, but so is war.
I spent my entire career in light infantry
and never worked a lot with tanks (they referred to us as “crunchies”). Tankers were a strange, fatalistic breed
which the movie does a great job of
capturing. Infantrymen have a healthy respect for tankers, probably dating back to the initial training where they put you in a fighting position and have a sixty ton, armored beast come straight at you and do a couple pivot steers directly on top of your position. A change of underwear is usually required afterwards.
No comments:
Post a Comment