Mi Cielo
“This wall will needto go to make room for the new walkway, and I want the door taken out of this doorway. It needs to be open. Maybe an arch. Can we do an archway?” I ask Ralph, the foreman of my tiny crew for the renovations.
“We can,” he nods, making a note on his clipboard. “That should go well with the rounded upper windows in the entryway.”
“Great. Everything else stays according to the blueprints I sent over a few weeks ago. We can get started right away, as long as the supply shipments were on time,” I say.
“Got it all out in the trailer,” he replies, nodding towards the front door.
“Great, let’s get to it then.”
The crew of three arrived this morning, and I’ve been buzzing with excitement ever since. This is my favorite part of every project. The beginning. When everything is all mapped out and ready, and we finally get to start to dig into the work.
There’s so much potential.
Ralph and his two crew men are freelancers out of Idaho we hire for a lot of my projects. Since I focus on small vacation rentals like the cabin, not big apartment buildings, it only takes a few crew members to make it happen.
After they do all of the big jobs like knocking down walls, installing flooring, painting, and major repairs, I take over from there. I design each rental to fit in with the local feel of the area along with my signature style, and add all of the finishing touches. It’s a great system.
For the next few weeks, I’ll oversee Ralph and the guys, while working on smaller tasks that don’t require their expertise. Today, I’m digging up some flower beds along the edges of the cabin. My vision for the yard is outdoorsy and natural to Wyoming. I’ll be planting local wildflower seeds in the flower beds, along with a few perennial bushes that will pop up each summer.
Once the crew gets started inside, I grab my shovel and head out back. Thorn covered weeds are sprinkled throughout the backyard, the former flower beds overgrown with morning glory vines. Long cheatgrass has already started to sprout along the fence. There may have been a lawn at one point but it has blended with the rolling fields surrounding the property, wild and untamed.
With my gloved hands on my hips, I take in the view.It’s a lot of work now, but in a few months, you won’t be able to tell it ever looked like this,I think to myself. Letting out a hopeful sigh, my shovel sinks through the top layer of the flowerbeds.
When I was a teenager, Aunt Millie and I spent a lot of time out in her garden. It’s probably why I still do the landscaping for my vacation rentals. It relaxes me. She used to buy me a new pair of patterned garden gloves every year.
Sometimes they were flamingo print, other times they were bright yellow. I’d go outside and plant flowers, harvest peppers from the garden, replant tomatoes every spring, pull weeds, or sometimes just sit and listen to the birds. Then, by the end of the summer, my gloves were caked in dirt and covered in holes.
As I got older, I planted more fruit and vegetables in the garden and used them to cook with Aunt Millie. I still remember the year we had an abundance of strawberries, and had to use them in pretty much everything so they didn’t all go bad. We had strawberry smoothies, strawberry pie, strawberry jam, strawberry cake. I didn’t eat strawberries for a year after.
It felt nice to have something I could take care of. Something I could focus on when I was down. My parents might have sent me to a brand new place in the middle of nowhere, they might forget to check-in weekly, Aunt Millie might have a busy week and be gone a lot.
But, I always had the garden to escape to. No matter what.
I’m so lost in my thoughts I don’t notice I’m no longer alone outside until I hear a thud from behind me. A figure looms over by the back fence, collecting the wooden logs that have fallen onto the ground into a pile.Miles.
My heart skips a beat as he lifts a fence post that was lying on its side. He’s wearing a long sleeved button-up shirt today, but he may as well be wearing no shirt at all with how tight it’s hugging his muscles.
A backwards baseball cap covers his inky hair as if he has psychic powers and knows that’s my weakness. Damn backwards baseball caps.
He must sense me staring, too, because as soon my eyes slide back to his arms, he looks right at me. My cheeks betray me, immediately heating up. Maybe he’ll think I’m flushed from shoveling out the flowerbeds.
I smile and wave, and to my surprise, he nods politely back at me before continuing to move the fence posts. He actually acknowledged me. He didn’t just ignore me, or worse, scowl in my general direction.
We are making progress, people.
By the time Miles leaves in the afternoon, I’ve just gotten all of the flowerbeds dug out and he has finished removing the knocked down fence posts. Now the fence looks like it has an intentional break in the back corner instead of cattle damage. Who knew fences could be trampled by cows so easily?
The crew has just finished packing up their tools to call it a day when I feel another warm breeze inside the house. This time, I don’t have any weird imaginings. All I feel is a strong pull towards the fireplace again. Maybe that’s where a draft is coming in.
Nothing seems out of place on the fireplace. The smooth, gray oval stones that make the fireplace are the only thing in the entire cabin that seem brand new. I don’t know how I didn’t notice before, but it seems like this fireplace hasn’t been used at all.
There’s no soot anywhere, no dirt or dust on any of it. It’s pristine. Whoever was taking care of this place for the ranch must have really loved this fireplace.
I reach out and touch one of the stones above the opening, and immediately recoil. It’s hot. As hot as an oven door when it’s on.
The warm breeze is long gone now, it’s actually starting to feel a little cold with the sun going down. But somehow, the fireplace is warm enough I’d expect it to have had a fire roaring in it all day long. Maybe I missed something. Maybe the crew had some sort of machine close to the stones and they absorbed the heat.
