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Slow builds and painful beginnings.  Anguish expressed by the pinched but smiling faces of employees, working for free.  Promises and promises.  More promises.  The tempo builds.  The workers build.  Everyone builds.

All at once until the noise is maddening, but then a break.  The sun shines.  Clouds separate and the workers shed an outer layer.  Customers see things take shape and begin to smile.  Promises and promises.  More promises.  What once were only words and dreams have taken shape.

The final week breaks into a quick time tempo.  No more promises, only action.  A final flurry and final arrangements.  Stone and stain, plants and custom latches all arrive with unbelievable precision.  Jaws drop and neighbors gather and everyone steps back to admire.

Except us, who scurry away to begin the song all over again in another place for other people.

Today I must be busy.  Think of me as a phone call, placed to someone irritating, say like the IRS.  If you call them, you have to wait.  Pure and simple.  I’m kind of like that today.

Thank you for visiting Word Shadows.  Your comments are always greatly appreciated, and will be replied to in the order they were received.

A big project is nearly complete and demands one final burst of my energy.  You have to love the customer who one second asks you why things take so long, and the next asks you to walk around the garden with her and marvel at the rhododendron blooms.

Word Shadows appreciates its readers.  Please continue to hold and someone will be with you shortly.  Your hold time is approximately [in computer generated voice] six hours and fourteen minutes.

After today, things will be different.  By simple definition, today can’t be tomorrow, and that alone makes things different.  Doesn’t it?

Thank you for holding.  In order to expedite your comments, your cooperation is appreciated.  Using the alphanumeric keypad on your touchtone phone, please enter the opening chapter from Leo Tolstoy’s novel, War and Peace.  If you make a mistake, simply press *9, and begin again.  Your hold time is approximately [the voice] six hours and thirteen minutes.

There is a place that is not 40 degrees and nonstop rain.

There is a place where forty phone messages are not waiting to be returned, sitting in a neat pile next to an even neater pile of unpayable bills.

There is a place where people are not always waiting for you to show up.  A place where they don’t call every other day, asking, “when will it be finished?” A place where people are not forced to speak in a professional tone because they need their business to not shrivel and die.

There is a place where refinancing a house, and making rent, and arranging a divorce are not all daily concerns.

There is a place where people want more then just time to close their eyes and sleep.

I know where that place is, but am having trouble getting there.  It’s like looking for myself in the steamed over bathroom mirror.  I’m there, but I’m not.

I wonder how some people can stay with the same job for so long without going crazy.

For fifteen years now, I’ve done the same job, and crazy now has a better office then me.  Fifteen years that seem like forever.

And the people I meet, most of them very nice and very pleasant, always want the same thing.  They call me to their home and expect me to convince them of what they want.  Sometimes they have ideas, but they are always cloudy.  I am there for clarity.  I am given the pleasure of trying to read their minds.  I am there to settle their disputes.  A contractor is nothing more then a diplomat and therapist and mind reader all rolled into one.

Who would ever believe that landscapes would cause so much tension between husbands and wives?  That battles of will could be fought over the placement of something so small as a tulip bulb?