Keeping Our Center ~ Day 129

Here’s one of my favorite ASP stories. It was hot. Well, almost hot by Appalachian standards. We had two crews on Claude and Margaret’s house, which had little in the way of actual footers, and a room where the floor had rotted out. 

Together, the crews worked for 5 days to dig out the old footers, jacking up the house to get under the walls. We hand mixed about 3 ton of concrete for new footers and set the house back down on solid cement block. At the same time we tore out the floor of the room which would eventually be a handicapped accessible bathroom, broke out a huge rock in the middle of it (part of the mountain, I’m sure) with sledgehammers, and reframed the floor on top of the new footers.

If I do say so myself, we were awesome. We worked hard, worked well as a team and got it all done But what I remember most about the week had nothing to do with work. It had to do with Claude and Margaret.                                      

Margaret could probably qualify as older than the hills. For someone who had been living in a house that was falling down around her, she was still all smiles and warmth and flower print dresses. Her probably 50-something-year-old son Claude, in his plaid shirts with his impish, I’m-trouble smiles, liked to supervise and kid around with us throughout the week. 

A couple of days at lunch time, Dan Blimling (Beth’s husband and our fearless leader) brought out his guitar and we sang some songs and chit-chatted with Claude and Margaret while we ate our soggy peanut butter and jelly or ham and cheese sandwiches.

On our last day, we were dirty, sweaty and tired, working hard to finish up, when Claude brought out an ice cold watermelon. I tell you, nothing has ever tasted so good, so sweet, so perfect. I didn’t do too badly in the watermelon seed spitting contest either, go figure! 

I guess, at the end of the day, what I’m trying to convey is that it was developing relationships that was the most spiritual, valuable thing that happened that week. It was about connecting in some natural human way with people who, at first glance, seemed very different from us. It was recognizing that compassion, caring, and showing interest were just as important, maybe even more important, than fixing the house. 

When we all come to the end of our lives we may very well have forgotten people’s names, and exactly what happened, and precisely what was said, but we’ll remember how they made us feel.

Love & Light!

Kaye