Time before +Time
Up early here in the rectory of Trinity, Apalachicola, where we lived from midsummer 1984 to early fall 1998 and where Tass grew up, filling my life with happiness and love. Built in 1900, the delightful old home has been beautifully renovated since we lived here.
Memories sans sentimentality: upstairs, the closets we had built into the master BR that, later added over the kitchen, lacked any closet space; the bathtub I bought at HomeDepot in PC that had then to be lifted to the second floor roof and window by crane; the matching doorknobs I bought at Lowe’s PC and installed in Tassy’s bedroom’s three doors; the notch I carved in the MBR bathroom door so the old fashioned vertical rim lock would close and lock; the MBR window looking out on Highway 98 where eighteen-wheelers and emergency vehicles raced by to wake us at all hours.
Downstairs, the side porch on the church side that we had closed in for use as my office and where Tassy’s rats* resided stinkingly for a Time and where Martha & Mickey’s large cat Blaise took refuge while we were “moving in” Thursday afternoon; the wood door between the parlor and family room that I removed from my 1912 house in PC (it may have been the outside back kitchen door by the old round table), brought over here to Apalachicola, and installed here in the 1900 rectory because “they” no longer make that width door. The house has a new metal roof that probably corrected the leaky roof in the family room.
No longer a baby tree, the magnolia I had planted in the rectory front yard because Linda loved magnolia blossoms. The fence we had installed at the sidewalk round the yard to protect Tassy’s cats from marauding dogs needs painting again and maybe even replacing. In the side yard outside the kitchen window, one of the fig trees my mother gave me one Christmas, for the rectory yard (the other one, I dug up and replanted in my yard at home when we moved from here in 1998).
Thursday sunset from Tassy's front bedroom window. Early yet, but if Apalachicola hasn’t really changed after all, just before dawn roosters will start crowing all over town and mostly on the north side that was called “The Hill.”
*Hear my experienced testimony from yore: a rat ain’t worth a damn for a pet.
Meantime, by iPhone I exchanged emails with the rector, who’s on vacation in Scotland, and got the correct password for the internet here in the building so we can keep close watch on Hurricane Irma. This is an interesting town and county from which to evacuate hurricanes, BTDT thirty-seven years ago for three summer/fall storms in 1985. I’m not appreciating when the National Hurricane Center track forecast for Irma shifts back west.
Right now, I’m sitting at the metal top kitchen table that Pearl Marshall gave the rectory, that had been in the kitchen where she grew up when her father was lighthouse keeper on StGeorge Island back in the nineteenth century.
Way too early for me to be up, that’s the front fence here at 79 6th Street 32320 and the Coombs House Inn across the street; a house with another story for another time.
DThos+ enjoying Time before +Time
