Concrete Thoughts...

Building walls and similar.

Even though my mind at times seems set in stony concrete I am talking of the real concrete. The stuff of buildings, the stuff of hard work and the stuff that creates our living spaces.

We are getting new neighbours at some stage and when they first said that their house would be built within a two months time frame, I swallowed my instant reply. Builders are always fashionably late over the finish line and so far the two months haven't even seen the walls roofed.

To get a bit of the stifling heat out of our house we opened the windows early already and just after seven there was a commotion of gigantic proportion outside. Mausi vacated her window perch instantly and hid among the pillows and I notice two huge concrete mixing trucks right outside our bedroom windows. In fact, they filled the window and thank goodness I made our bed because only truck drivers sit high enough off the ground to catch a glimpse of our lives.

Standing there watching the belly of the beast turning rhythmically reminded me of how Bob, mum and I spent endless Saturdays mixing the concrete by hand. Well, shoveling the sand, concrete and water into a little mixing machine by hand. One load filled a wheelbarrow and compared to these gigantic mixing trucks, a David & Goliath affair.

These last few weeks I have lost count of the number of concrete trucks that have squeezed themselves around our house ( a sharp corner across from which our new neighbours chose to build ) while extending their long arm to shoot the liquid concrete to where it is needed. Surely they should be finished by now?

Taking this detour down memory lane is rather useful. Often I forget how much we've done to our house bearing in mind that we started our renovations with not two but four left hands. Nothing to be ashamed of and in fact, the opposite. It's easy when you know how but character building if you don't. For the next few hours I will float proudly over our floors, knowing that we and not a fancy machine rebuilt the floors throughout our house. Of course we had a builder to help with the concreting, but still not a mean feat...

Biggi