I capture a lot of things I hear in the Notes app on my phone. It’s not as romantic as carrying around a notebook with a worn letter cover like I imagine writers of the past have done, but infinitely more practical.
I also like haiku, as you know, and sometimes a sentence just spills out of someone in haiku form, begging to be documented. This one from a colleague did:
you gotta lay down
that pavement before I can
go walking on it
He was talking about how everything needs a foundation, that you can’t just jump into something without laying the groundwork and expect it to work.
That’s true. And at the beginning of something, the “laying down of the pavement,” things will often be messy.
That’s the case here at Gumbo Cove as we drink our morning coffee on this President’s day, a day off for us. The bulkhead was in a bad state when we bought this cute little bay cabin, and it’s the first major improvement.
It’s a mess. Below is what we saw when we arrived on Friday.
The sunny day helped; sparkles on the water are always so appealing, and there’s even a nice sheen to the mud (which smells, by the way). This morning, it just looks like slop.
But it will be FABULOUS when it’s done, right? We’re just laying down the foundation for our future days by the water.
Back to my colleague’s wisdom – ever since I jotted down his profound and accidentally poetic statement, I’ve been looking for a picture to accompany it. I found one in my photo archives, from December 2018, just outside Covent Garden in London.
How many people have trod on these stones over the years, living their lives as earnestly then as we are living ours today? That’s probably the subject of another post, because this one has meandered like a slow-moving bayou into the St. Louis Bay.
But you gotta lay down that pavement, right?
