Week 28

Looking out the side door on a beautiful morning
with fog over the water.

Insulation blues

Itchiness reigns all over

Even under skin

Sometimes a haiku can say it all, but this one does not even begin to describe how hellishly itchy and generally miserable it is to install hundreds of feet of insulation over the course of a couple days. And it’s not just walls either, it’s the ceilings as well; tall, frustrating ceilings. Someone’s got to do it though, and hopefully we can finish it up this coming week and then forget how awful it was.

Before beginning insulation, I spent three days de-nailing studs, putting up new siding, pulling out old windows, reframing said windows, and installing brand new ones. The house we’re working on is apparently an old whorehouse, situated directly across from the still functioning train station. It’s a gigantic two story house that everyone in town simply refers to as “the big blue house.” Anytime we’re out and about in uniform, people constantly come up to us to ask us what we’re working on, and to give us their enthusiastic thanks for our dedication. Of all the places we’ve been so far, I’d say Hattiesburg is the friendliest.

There’s a woman I worked with this week who is a contract archeologist who has been doing a lot of work in Alaska. Wanting to relax and get out of the cold for the winter, she’s been in Hattiesburg since November (her family lives here). She started to get a little stir crazy not having a regular job, and one day when she was out and about, she noticed that “the big blue house” was being restored. Walking up to inspect the work that was being done, she found Darryl, the man in charge who works on the place alone when there are no volunteer or AmeriCorp groups. Anyway, she told him she’d never worked construction, but she’s got time to spare and is not afraid to get her hands dirty. She been showing up to help on the house a few days a week ever since. This town has such a neat sense of community.

Yes, I always smile this big when using a
nail gun.

Oh, and the organization we’re working with right now is called R3SM. Check them out if you get a chance. They’re pretty cool and do great things here in Hattiesburg.

My favorite part of every work day is lunch time, not just because I’m hungry and am ready to devour the contents of my self-packed meal, which is true too, but also because my entire team spends the hour sitting on the second story roof, eating, napping, tanning, and waving at the passersby below. With our boots unstrung and our sleeves rolled up to our shoulders, people are constantly honking good naturedly at us and giving us broad smiles, making us feel so wanted and welcome, we don’t mind when it’s time to get back to work for the afternoon.

With all the strenuous activity we’ve been engaged in throughout the workday, everyone is utterly drained at the end of the day, and I don’t think anyway has been staying up past 10 o’clock as a general rule. When I get too much sleep, I don’t function very well, so I’ve been setting my alarm for 6am and then trying to keep myself awake until 10pm. Let me tell you, staying up that late is a struggle. I read for hours in the evenings and by the time 9:30 rolls around, my eyes have to fight to reopen after an ordinary blink. I usually end up giving in at about 9:45, and then I inevitably wake up at 5 or 5:30 and lay in bed thinking things out before the day officially begins.

Our kitchen did not come complete with a traditional coffee pot, but we did receive a camp percolator in our “spike kit”, which is what campus gives a team when they live in a place with no dishes or cookware, consisting mostly of things you’d use when cooking on a Colman stove or over an open fire. Anyway, I’ve never used a percolator before, but I remember Dad using one when we’d go camping in the Rockies. Through trial and error, I’ve concocted a formula for a pretty delicious beverage, though I’m still not sure if I’m doing it correctly. Also, it brings back some bad memories, as Scotty got severely burned as a toddler when he pulled a pot like this onto himself during a camping trip. The pot was filled with freshly boiled water, and there was a span of time when we weren’t sure if Scotty would ever have the use of one of his arms. Sometimes I get a nauseous feeling in the pit of my stomach when I’m using this pot, but I suppose you can’t let bad memories dictate how you live, so I try not to think about it.

I’ve also started eating white rice with brown sugar for breakfast, because it keeps me full until lunch time; a difficult feat when working hard and sweating a lot. I never cared much for oatmeal due to the texture, but rice is nice (though it’s just a grain ;). I recommend this if you’re one of those people who eats breakfast and then is starving an hour or two before lunchtime.

A trend for this week has been fishing. The ponds in front of our little cottage are stocked with blue gill, crappie, and catfish (there may be others, but this is what we’ve caught so far), and John and Cain both bought cheap poles at Walmart to fish with. We’ve had a lot of fun seeing what we can catch, and the boys have gotten up really early a couple of mornings to go out and fish before work.

John had never been fresh water fishing before, and wanting to have “the full experience”, he decided to keep 2 of the fish he caught (both tiny blue gills) so that he could cook them up and eat them. First of all, he couldn’t find a bucket to put them in upon reeling them out of the pond, so he used our one big cooking pot (I washed this several times before cooking with it). He caught them in the morning, so to preserve them for when he had time to gut them, he froze them. How can I relay the events of that morning in mere words? I feel I’m not equipped to explain the ridiculousness of the event, but I’ll try.

As I nonchalantly walked into the kitchen to refill my coffee cup, the word on the street was something involving fish, freezers, and injustice. Wanting to understand the buzz, I opened the freezer, and there, lying beside the ice cube box were two fish, sealed individually in zip lock sandwich bags. To get a closer look, I pulled the bags from the freezer, one in each hand, and stared into the eyes of the scaly beings. Assuming them dead as any person would assume an animal in the freezer, you can imagine my surprise when the creatures began to flop inside the bags I still held in my hands as if I had just pulled them from the pond myself. I screamed and jumped into the air, never breaking my eye contact with what I now realized were eyes staring back at me.

Apparently, John had put them in the freezer alive, thinking that freezing them was as a good a way as any to kill them. I suppose that’s where the buzz on injustice originated. Did I mention I’m a new vegetarian because of my convictions concerning the inhumanness of animal treatment within the factory farming industry? I handed the flip-flopping baggies to John and told him he had to kill the fish before freezing them, so he took them outside and rocked over their heads with the rocking chair on our porch. When do boys stop being boys?

I caught the first fish, so a picture was
in order, even if the fish was minuscule.

This week I did my laundry at a laundry mat for the first time in my life. It was pretty uneventful, but it will definitely keep me from taking the luxury of doing laundry in my house for granted. There’s a big difference between throwing a load in and walking away to proceed with your regular activities, and sitting around in a smelly room for an hour and half when you’re bone tired.

You Hotwork folks (George Kopser especially) might be interested to know that the insulation I was putting up this week was manufactured by Owens Corning. Once a name on a file folder in an air conditioned office, now a name on insulation roles in a structure consisting of studs and broken siding. There was a time not so long ago when glass, to me, meant a beautiful picture on the Hotwork lobby wall of bright colored lava, pouring from a factory building. Now, it means tiny dust particles in my lungs, hair, eyeballs, and I swear, even underneath my skin. How the tables of my life have turned!

Love,

 k