After the Deluge

So, this is what was facing me after the flood.

You can see how the water pushed everything over.

Yes, that's the third seat of the suburban. Gah!

Now after a week of sweat and muck and mosquitoes, the garage is cleaned out from the floor to two feet up. I am sorry to say we lost some things we would rather have kept. But a lot of what we found was years and years of my parents' junk and trash. There was plenty of in-between stuff that I hauled to the curb to find new homes. And some fine new yard art.

One of my favorite finds, safely preserved in the boat, is a quintessential Dad item. Mom and Dad's house number has always been poorly marked. They would never pay to have someone spray paint their number on the curb. The house numbers they do have are right by the front door and cannot be seen from anywhere but the front porch. When someone tries to find the house, especially at night, we just have to walk outside and flag them down. So when I found this,

I knew I had found Dad's solution to the house number deficiency. Lesser men might have gone to the hardware store and purchased numbers to attach to their home, but not Dad. In his neat script, he wrote his house numbers on a file folder which he then attached to a frame he constructed from scrap lumber. Problem solved, Dad-style. And now it is a lovely addition to our growing collection of yard art.

There is mucho mucho mas to be done in the garage, namely everything from two feet on up, but I am leaving it for another time (maybe a cooler time?) and moving on to other things that need tending to. One of my biggest disappointments in the cleanup was that we could not get the boat to budge. I was really looking forward to seeing my childhood boat everytime I looked out the kitchen window. Oh well. I can always visit it in the garage.