If I were a carpenter...

Jessi Bullard writes:

Day 2 of working at our Habitat site. I think the best way to describe the day is to share the little piece of heaven on earth that is called ‘shower hour.’ First of all, taking off work boots must be the best feeling ever! It evokes non-human grunts even from the most timid of people. After taking off the socks comes the decision to leave on or take off the band-aids that cover yesterday’s blisters and boo-boos. (even now, as I sit in the grand old living room of our house, I can hear Mike and Andrew talking to each other in the showers about how good it feels after a long day of good, physical labor) As I get in the shower I can’t help but thinking of going to the beach. I smell of sunscreen. I feel the slight burn of lukewarm water on my sunburned forearms and neck. I discover sand in formally undiscovered crevices. For you see, when Andrew, Ginny, Christina, Charles, Nancy and I crawled under the houses to staple wire mesh to hold in the insulation, we were not crawling on dirt, but on sand. Another wake up call that I’m in New Orleans. It was during this playtime in the sandbox under the house that we met Mercedes. Mercedes is the future homeowner of the house next door (the habitat site we are working at is currently working on about 5 houses). With her perfectly manicured hands (she’s a dealer at a casino) she showed all of us up with her mad staple-hammer skillz (staple-hammer: some funky-looking tool that, when you hammer something, automatically shoots in a staple). We started talking about the colors of her neighbors’ houses. The particular house we were under had green trim with greener siding. The house across the street from the green house has purple trim with... guess... purpler siding. Yes, there is such a thing as purple and purpler and you will find it in New Orleans! However, though we have dubbed the green house, “the green house” and the brown house, “the brown house”, we cannot call the purple house, “the purple house”. Because, lo and behold, there are two purple houses! Mercedes said she was going for more neutral colors. So, today we opened up the paint tubs that hold Mercedes’ future house colors and we found...pink. That’s right, Mercedes’ color scheme is pink...and pinker.

As I’m giggling to myself about Mercedes ‘neutral’ colors and picking dried spots of paint of this first shade of pink from my forearm, I see that it’s made a design because the paint came first and the sunburn came second. After utilizing the sand on my face as an exfoliating scrub, I look down and realize that those chunks of wood?!? and pieces of earth were not in the shower before I was. This reminds me of the sign that hangs on the door to the entrance to the showers/laundry room, “Please remove all nails, screws, etc. from pockets before washing”. Another reminder of where I am and why I am (where I am). All these little pangs feel so good. My hand shaking from exhaustion, while just trying to open a shampoo bottle, reminds me. It reminds me why my hand is shaking. My hand is shaking because I hammered nails. I hammered nails to secure a roof to its frame. This process is called, “hurricane proofing’. Hurricane proofing. Yet another reminder of where I am and why I am (where I am).