The Gate

"No, but I'm thirsty. I think I'll have a beer. Want anything?"

"Just a bottle of water for me. Hey, could we play a game? I noticed you've got Clue in the game cupboard. Will you teach me to play it? I've heard people talk about it but I never even saw what it looks like. I remember hearing something about Colonel Mustard with a lead pipe."

"Sure. It's a fun game. I'll get it out and you clear off the coffee table." We played a game, going slowly so I could explain every step of it, and Sally caught on very quickly. In fact, she won, even without me trying to let her. And her solution? In the billiard room, Colonel Mustard with a lead pipe! When I pulled the cards out of the little envelope and showed her that she was right, she laughed so hard that it brought tears to her eyes.

When we put the game away we still weren't sleepy. I went out to the kitchen and got creative, mixing diced peaches with some whole berry cranberry sauce, and serving it in small bowls over cottage cheese on Romaine lettuce leaves.

"Oh, how clever. How'd you think of this?"

"I just looked around and threw together what I happened to find. Hope you like it."

"I do. The flavors blend so well. Let's remember this if we ever want to serve a light salad. You really do come up with some great ideas in the kitchen, like that meatloaf you made with the apple diced up in it. It was simple, but who would ever have thought of it? Maybe you ought to look over my shoulder when I'm cooking and make suggestions."

"Maybe once in a while, but in general I don't know anything that would wreck our relationship faster than me trying to tell you how to cook. The difference between a professional and an amateur is that the amateur will hit a lucky shot once in a while, but the professional knows how to do a great job on every single meal, day in and day out."

We enjoyed our little salad and then I pulled up a two-hour detective show I'd recorded a few weeks back. We watched it while we snuggled on the sofa, and it was the best TV watching I'd ever done. I was sitting at the right end of the sofa, supported by the back and the armrest. Sally was up against my rib cage, her head on my shoulder, with my left arm loosely laid around her. I could feel her right tit against my chest when she moved around, and I didn't feel any constraint in its motion, suggesting that her bra might not be there with us. That meant that when my free hand happened to wind up under her arm, I could gently stroke her left tit. The effect was that my hand was tenderly admiring her body, not actively trying to seduce it. She seemed to get the message, snuggling more tightly against me and sort of purring. The show was much better than the average TV fare and we got absorbed in it, tossing ideas back and forth as we tried to figure out who killed the millionaire playboy. We had pretty well narrowed it down to either his jilted girlfriend or his brother who had a gambling addiction. I was fast forwarding through a commercial break when Sally suddenly sat up and announced, "Hey I've got it. I should be a detective. It wasn't either one of them. It was Colonel Mustard with a lead pipe!"

* * * * *

We took our morning coffee out to the backyard to look at our project. It had progressed well and the new gate was about completed. What hadn't been addressed yet was attaching the hinges to the house. The old gate hinges were attached to a board that had eventually pulled away from the corner of the house, and had to be reattached a few years back with a couple of long lagscrews. But the new gate was almost twice as high as the old one, and the old board wouldn't be suitable. It would have to be removed, along with a piece of trim above it, and a new board put up that would extend all the way up to the eaves. There was nothing terribly complicated about it, but it was tricky to coordinate all the tasks so that the dogs wouldn't have to be kept out of the yard for long.

Sally stood looking at the gate, obviously thinking. The hinges were loosely attached to the gate, which at this point weighed well over a hundred pounds. A nine foot long 2x4 had to be attached to the house, and the hinges had to be attached to that, while trying to hold the heavy gate in midair. Obviously, that wasn't a good way to go about it.

"Look, Carl, we already know where the hinges go on the gate, and the bolt holes are already drilled. Let's snug up those bolts just a little and position the 2x4 next to the gate and attach the hinges to it. Then we can unbolt the hinges from the gate and put the 2x4 up on the house, which means that all we have to do to mount the gate is hold it in the right place and shove two bolts through, one each in the top and bottom hinges. They'll hold the gate while we put the other four in and tighten everything up. We shouldn't need to keep the dogs in the house for more than an hour. What do you think?"

"Sounds to me like a good plan. Let's get to work on it." I tried to hide my surprise at her understanding of everything we had to do, and how well she had put it all into a sensible order, because I didn't want to scare her off. People who've never been involved in a project like this don't usually connect the dots anywhere near as well as she had. And as the old saying goes, the devil's in the details.

It seemed to me that every day Sally brought me a fresh surprise. Yes, she was a sweet little girl who had been left all alone in a cruel world and needed my help. No, that was far from all there was to her, and like a perfectly cut diamond she had facets that I never dreamed of. Was I being rewarded for my generosity? That's one way to look at it, and whatever the answer, my appreciation knew no bounds.

The only thing I interjected into her plan was paint. We started out by mating the long 2x4 to the hinges, and then stopped to set the hinges aside and put a coat of paint on the 2x4 and the outside face of the gate.

While the paint was drying we went inside and had breakfast. I cleaned up the kitchen while Sally took the dogs for a walk, which would get them in the mood to take a nap while we worked on the gateway. I went out and checked the paint while they were walking, and judged it to need another hour before we did any serious handling of the freshly painted surfaces. I went in and put the TV on, tuned to a news channel, and when my little family returned we sat down to find out what was going on in the world. We were cuddling comfortably on the sofa with our clothes on, positioned just the same as on the Colonel Mustard night. The news was somewhat interesting, but nothing to get all worked up over. What was far more important was the feeling of being close together, so much in love that there was nothing we'd rather do than sit there, feeling our bodies pressed together just the way our minds were intimately interlocked. And maybe our souls, too, but I don't know nearly as much about them, or hearts either. Remember that old song, 'Heart and Soul'? Well, for whatever it's worth, that's just the way we were. And it made me feel wonderful all over.

Finally, as the same news was starting all over again, we turned off the TV and got busy. The old gate came off easily, but removing the hinge board and the trim piece from the house took more work than I had expected. I came down the ladder I had propped up against the side of the house to get a pry bar, and Sally surprised me by saying, "That looks like fun. Let me go up and try." She scampered up the ladder with the pry bar and popped the trim off quickly, in fact made it look easy. I grabbed it and set it aside, and cleaned the dirt away from where the new 2x4 would go. Sally was putting the hinges onto the 2x4 in the meantime, and we felt pretty good about our progress when we set it up against the house, resting the bottom end on a brick that I had already set in place and used for the baseline of our vertical measurements. Near the top, middle, and bottom of the 2x4 I had twelve-penny nails already in place, their points just peeking out of the back surface. Sally was up the ladder again, holding the 2x4 in place, while I lined up the bottom end and pounded the bottom nail almost all the way in. The I did the same thing with the one in the middle, and finally she did it to the top one. We looked it all over very critically and when it had passed our inspection we hammered the nails the rest of the way in. Then came the drilling and wrenching in the lagscrews that would do the real work of holding the 2x4 in place against the weight of the heavy gate. Sally came down the ladder and we stood there, looking at what we'd accomplished together. "Carl, this isn't like anything I've ever done before, and I love it. Just look at that, our 2x4 is right on the house, and it'll be there as long as the house is. It's exactly right, and it looks very professional. Oh, this is such fun!"

I couldn't have been happier. I had gained a housekeeper, a lover, and a carpenter's helper, all rolled up in one. And her young knees carried her up and down a ladder about three times as fast as mine could go.

The gate went up a lot more easily than I'd expected. We fooled around with scraps of lumber to block it up to the right height to line up with the hinges, and while I held it in place Sally poked the bolts through and ran around to the back side to spin nuts onto them finger tight. Then it was just teamwork, Sally banging bolts through from the back while I put the washers, lockwashers, and nuts on the front and tightened everything up. I cleared everything out of the way and she swung the gate open and closed a few times, just as proud as a cat playing with a mouse.

* * * * *

When the tools were all put away, she came and put her arms around my waist in a big hug. "This is another important step that I've got to remember. Come over here and sit down by me because I've got to try to explain this to you, how it all has gone from my viewpoint. We've gone through a whole lot of steps, and every step made us closer in a different way.

"It all started when I walked up to you outside and asked for work. So that was step one. Then you fed me, step two. I opened up to you, told you about how screwed up my life was, step three. You took me in here to live, step four. I worked hard to be the best housekeeper you could ever have, and the more of it I did, the more I developed skills I'd never had before, and the more I loved it. All that was step five. The whole burglary episode, so dangerous and you were so brave and you saved my life, step six. That was really a huge step. It was so scary and it let loose so many emotions. It was really enormous. So we discovered our love for each other, step seven. Another huge one. Our intimate relationship, going to bed together and making love, was step eight. Helping you with your gate project got me more and more involved with what you were doing, starting with just helping you lift and move the gate, and going all the way to helping you plan the last part and then putting it together with you. So that was an important step nine, because it resulted in us thinking and working together, while we were doing something important. And seeing the completion of it all, everything in place and looking and working just right, that's such a great feeling that it's worth a step of its own, step ten.

"This has been a wonderful journey of discovery, of learning, of finding you, finding myself, finding love and peace of mind. Sort of like a coming of age ritual. I must tell you once again, you are the most important thing in my life, and it's not possible to love anybody more than I love you.

"I know you've given some thought to the years ahead, how old you'll be when I'm thirty and forty and all that, and I want to make it perfectly clear that you have nothing to worry about on that score, ever. You've rescued me and protected me and been everything I've needed through these ten steps, and I'll be everything you'll ever need for--well--forever!

"End of speech. Now let's get on with our lives, together!"