Power to the People

If you had asked me even yesterday if I thought our house-building project was on track to get concrete today, I would have replied with an emphatic NO. And then last night this arrived in my inbox from our contractor Dusty:

“Electric conduit is installed and inspected and back filled. Footers are done and inspected. We are on the schedule for concrete tomorrow at 1 pm. My Karma is to pour the day before Thanksgiving, again, providing nothing changes with concrete company schedule, equipment, etc… We have been keeping the important parts of the ground covered and frost free. We are in good shape. Likely pouring stem walls early to mid next week. Feel free to come out tomorrow afternoon, 1-2 ish will be the most action.”

Sadly for Lynn, she agreed to help the short-handed Crested Butte Post Office this afternoon, so it will be up to Oz and me to take a lunch out and spectate at a concrete pouring. I believe this will be my first concrete pouring since the days of Tincup Drive.

I don’t recall seeing anything poured when we added a room to the back of my childhood house on Tincup, although surely I was around, but I do recall when my parents and whatever neighbors they roped in to help mixed cement and poured our patio, and then everyone pushed their hands into the setting concrete [I’m quite sure there are distinctions to be made between cement and concrete, and I’m probably using terms wrong here] and signed their names. I was just learning cursive, and my scrawled name took up about half the patio: the John Hancock of my time.

I’ll keep you posted as to just how exciting it might be to watch cement dry.

Now, about the hairy tree the electric box is leaned against in the picture above (seems dangerous to me, but what do I know?):  The entire north end of our lot is a cottonwood glade of mostly mature trees. It was also the widest point of our building envelope, but we got an exemption allowing us to exceed the narrowest point of the envelope in order to preserve trees, many of which are very, very mature (probably about 90 in Mickey Mouse years).

We had Dario of Tree Tamers come out and trim up the unruly trunks of most of the trees, but we skipped a couple, because we envisioned that the house might go where they lived.

But as time went on, I found it more unbearable that we should be the ones to topple such giants. Plus, the one to the west of the hoariest was the one Dario designated as being the healthiest. So the house kept sliding further south, and I have tasked Dusty with saving the baby cottonwood that is closest to the construction zone.

Unfortunately, we didn’t take any preventative steps for the little evergreen seedlings that cropped up in our yard on Irwin this spring. Lynn dug up a handful and transplanted them along the ditch on our lot, and faithfully tended them all summer. She still lost all but two (when you look around out there, there are not too many (maybe none) evergreens that haven’t been artificially plunked down. We didn’t think about taking any precautions with the last two, other than covering them with grass for the winter, because they’re hard by the ditch, but the backhoe has already managed to run over both of them.

There may be no hope for my baby cottonwood, standing as it does much closer to all the action, and who knows what happens when trenches are indiscriminately dug for gas and sewer and whatever else we need. The electricity comes from the treeless south, but everything else will come in from the north.

And once again I’ve reached an inconclusive end. I really just don’t recall endings being this hard before. I feel just like Beethoven: Should I end it here? No, maybe this is better. Or try this. Or that. Is this the end? Maybe.

We want these trees to stay with us and be healthy and happy.