Pistolero

I visited one of my brothers today.

I awoke early, about 4:30, brushed my teeth, and hit the road. Because my visit was to involve helping him plant a garden there was no point to showering. I reached his house around 7:30 this morning; I woke him up by calling him from my cell phone as I sat outside his house.

The trip down to see him was as much for my own sanity and serenity as it was to help him with the garden. I just needed a little time on the highway to clear my head. And I wanted time outdoors in the country, where I could smell the earth and hear birds chirp and not hear traffic and sirens.

My niece and her husband joined us an hour or two after I got there and they did most of the work in the garden. They planted a variety of peppers, eggplant, okra, several types of tomatoes, pinto beans, a variety of Paraguayan beans, cucumbers, a fig tree, and a lime tree. It's going to be a nice garden.

I spent much of my time disassembling a monstrous old satellite dish, one of the old-style 10-foot diameter beasts. It hadn't worked in years and has simply been an eyesore. With not much effort, we got the dish down. There remains a very heavy-duty steel post in the ground, though. It' probably six feet tall and an additional three feet or more is buried in concrete beneath the ground. I suspect the post will remain for some time to come.

We only worked until around 2 pm, so the day was not long at all, but it was a good start to some needed planting and sprucing up. There's much left to be done, but I think we got enough accomplished to get the ball rolling.

I want to go back and work outside, cleaning up the place and behaving as if I were living in my place in the country. There's something about that environment that I love, even though it's not the most beautiful place...it's just being outside in the quiet, in a relatively private place.

Speaking of quiet, we disrupted the quiet by shooting a 22-rifle. I'm not a gun person, not at all, but I tried my hand at shooting some cans off a box. Dead-eye John, they call me. My brother and his son-in-law also fired off a few rounds from my brother's pistol. My issue with guns (other than...they are guns) is that they are loud. I'm content to shoot a few rounds if it won't disturb or scare someone, but even out in the country, I suspect people hearing gunshots might not feel a deep level of comfort.