Progress on the Seawall

I’m six minutes late.

It’s a forty-five minute drive to our seawall project. I’m up early for a cup of coffee on the couch with Sasso in the dark, quiet morning.

At this hour I usually breeze through the coffee shop for my second cup, but there’s a back-up today. It’s ok. Willie and Brandon start getting the tools out of the boathouse at 7am sharp. They walk them down to the seawall while the excavator warms up. The saws, hammers, straps and lining bars are on the wall when I arrive.

We share morning pleasantries. It must sound unpleasant to strangers. We’re grown men but often sound more like teenage boys.  We communicate with a mixture of the simple: “how was your weekend?” the mundane: “what a beautiful day,” the profane (most of the inappropriate words you can think of arranged in varying degrees of cleverness), the raw: “she made me sleep on the couch last night,” and the diligently stoic reassurances: “this too shall pass” or “it is what it is.”

Then get to work.

Early morning on the seawall

It’s not the most “perfect” stonewall we’ve built. But, it fits the location and purpose well.