January First

The last thing I wanted to do on a day off was stop by the jobsite. Eliza had a point though. We were only six minutes away, and she doesn’t get to see my work in person very often.

Last night’s dusting of snow hid the ice that had turned the steep driveway into a luge track. Somehow, Eliza pulled the car out of a slide toward a drainage ditch and got us back up the hill in reverse. We parked on the side of the road and walked in, trying to find the crunchy snow along the edges.

We navigated around the first wall and its surrounding satellites of rock piles, all covered with tarps to keep out the snow and ice. As we walked across the yard towards the next wall the flower farm came into view, hibernating beneath eighteen inches of snow.

“It’s so cold here,” she said.

“You get used to it.”

We uncovered part of the next wall so she could see some of what I’ve been building. I didn’t have gloves on and my hands turned red removing the anchor rocks from the tarps.

“The rocks are bigger than they look in the photos,” she said. “This is a big project.”

I don’t need her to think I’m tough or to be impressed by the scale of the project. But having her walk through the snow, shiver in the cold, feel the size of the stones and see what I have to do with them, turned into a nice little moment of connection. How often do the people closest to us actually experience what our days are like?

We made it back to the car without slipping on the ice and turned on the heated seats. We drove home and made pancakes.