Abstract Thursday : : Kathy's Renegade Chicken

We arrived at Kathy's today to find her standing in front of her 'renegade' chicken in the driveway protecting it from cars, while it polished off the remains the cat food. Apparently this is a daily ritual, hence the nickname. I liked the abstract quality of the lines on the ground. 

We had lunch with our friends Mary and Jerry whose house burned down in October's fires. They are hoping to break ground on a new house by the end of July. Mary told me that she was happy to choose a builder's plan with the contractor's finishes and pay a fixed price. Too many painful decisions have already been forced on them. 

I mentioned that there were some changes that I thought we would make the moment we moved here that still haven't been made. They talked about how the first thing they planned to do in their house was install wood floor throughout. Other things intervened, but they finally got around to doing it in February, just a few months before the fire.

It is hard to imagine the magnitude of losing everything in a matter of hours. They both talked about how the only way to proceed was to establish priorities and proceed one step at a time. They needed clothes, they needed a car, they needed to deal with the insurance company (which didn't make things easy) and they needed place to live. Now that those things have been done, they are doing what they need just to live a 'normal' existence.

Jerry said he didn't know how many times they needed some item and he'd say, "I'll go out to the garage and get...oh wait. We don't have a garage...." Mary said they decided to take a break and go on a little vacation to the beach, and she thought, "oh wait, I don't have a bathing suit..." She says every day all she does is go shopping to replace kitchen utensils, sunscreen, tools, mattresses. It sounds like it might be fun, but she said, "trust me shopping for nails and Band-Aids, towels and doormats isn't that much fun."

I'm glad for them, though, that the major, gut wrenching decisions have been made and settled, and that now all they have to do is worry about nails and doormats....