Happening By

I am nothing if not impatient.
I am impatient.

Our weather has been,
not brutal, but inclement.
The El Niño that has brutalized
the rest of the continent,
and continents beyond,
passes by us altogether modestly,
producing rain modestly, so far.
Only when the cold fronts
from Siberia and Alaska
by way of the Pacific Northwest
push down this far south
do we get heavier rains, and frost.

Even so, and just so, working outside
is sometimes wetter and colder,
lying heavier on the scale of comforts
than dressing warmly and going outside.

It has been that way.
Progress on the rondavel--
if I dare to call it that, anymore--
has been slow.  One might say,
at a halt.  Yes:  at a halt.

It seemed to me that "Jao's house",
or the round house, or garden shed,
if you must be honest and pedestrian,
needed another window:  the vertical one
in the picture shown.  So now
the round house has three windows;
some best while standing,
the latest if sitting and thinking
about what is going on in the house
down the hill, or to see if someone called,
wondering where you were.

The latest window--
the oblong one--and the lower door side panels,
have been taken out and seal-stained
because the weather has gotten up above 50 F.,
which the ultra-fine print on the can suggests.

When the window returns
to its proper place in the universe,
I will wrap the building in building paper
and chicken wire, as a base for stuccoing.
Someone else will do the stuccoing:
I am no fool.  Then the roof.
I will do the roof:  a conical roof.
I am a fool.

When I was in my seventies,
I built a boat.
I did not know what I was doing,
but I needed to know
that being seventy was not too late in life.

Now I am in my eighties.
I do not need a rondavel, either.
But I do need to know
that I can make something lovely,
there where I happened by.