Good morning one and all and welcome to the middle of the week. I feel like I am finally back in the groove of life after the holiday break. It’s kind of nice. So let’s continue with our wave of normality and roll into our morning writing prompt shall we? Timers at the ready if you are joining in, and off we go.
I find this interesting. I think I condensed a lot of things and might need to go back and tease them out spreading them out a bit but it has the glimmer of an idea behind it. I just need to figure out how she ended up at this house.
Wednesday, November 30th: She took her time selecting her nail polish.
She took her time selecting her nail polish. After all the work she put in and all the abuse her hands suffered, it seemed a decadent delight. Work on the house had been going slow. While she knew nothing of electricity other than the fact that she needed to hire a professional to sort it out for her and understood that pluming too was a professionals job especially when the city threw in terms like main trains and the hiring of excavation equipment became necessary, she could do some of the grunt work.
She cleared out all of the trash and debris from the house. Most of the interior plaster was gone and the house looked like a person who had their skin peeled off, all the interior systems coating the bones showing. While they worked on giving her house a checkup making sure the electrics and the plumbing all worked as they were supposed to, she had to let the house sit. She monitored their progress and occupied herself with the grounds.
With the trench needed to connect her to the city systems filled in no one had much of a need to work outside. As a result Sarah cleared the over grown gardens and took out all of the dead branches and accumulated trash that collected in the dead and fallen branches. She dug out weeds that had decades to run unchecked making certain every vestige of a rootlet was taken out and sent on a long journey far away. Even with gloves on her hands and nails had taken a beating. She had never really be vain about her hands before, had never thought to be. Long nails were never her thing. She hated the way they clicked on the computer keyboard when she wrote e-mails just as much as she hated the way they clicked on the piano keyboard when she took piano lessons. She always kept her nails short and tidy, occasionally she would paint them a fun color. At the first sign of chipped polish she removed the color and went back to the natural look.
Work in the garden made her hands rough and her nails broken and uneven. She left them that way until she was done, knowing any attempt at repair would be futile while work was in progress. Finally the garden was stripped back to bare earth. In the end only two rose bushes set on the fence line, a Lilac and an old yew tree had been the only things that could be salvaged. While the ground looked as bare and broke as her nails about the time she finished, the weather turned. She loaded the ground with mulch and fertilizer and let it be.
About the time she finished, The first snow fall arrived. Now all of the work she did was hidden under a pristine blanket of white. As she worked on the garden, the tradesmen finished in the house. The interior systems were upgraded, sheet rock, plaster and paint were on the walls and her moving van arrived a few days earlier to add her belongings to the space. While the interior was still a jumble when she found her box of nail polishes, Sarah had been unable to resist. She took a long soak in her bathtub, not emerging until her skin was pruny and all vestiges of hot water were gone. She then went to work with exfoliators and creams softening her calluses and moisturizing the roughened bits. Nail clippers and file went to work on her nails and while they were now shorter than even she usually kept them, they were all smoothly rounded and looked healthy once again.
She looked over the color array before her trying to match the paint with her mood.
Ten til Midnight 