Every spring the tide takes another inch of the Astoria waterfront, and every spring Ruth Ferreira repaints the same nine feet of cedar siding. I spent four mornings on her dock trying to work out whether that is stubbornness or a kind of maintenance we’ve stopped teaching…
A tide chart is a promise made by the moon and broken by weather. For eleven weeks I logged the gap between the printed number and the mark on the piling, and the gap turned out to be a decent little portrait of the harbour — and of my own optimism…
Lime mortar wants a dry week and I gave it a wet one. What follows is a fairly humbling account of 63 square feet of chimney, two bags of the wrong sand, and the retired mason who watched me from across the street for three days before saying anything…
