The special term being sought is spatial, not spacial.
Please refer to the cartoon about grammerhell to comprehend.
Holy Cow, post: 350337, member: 50 wrote: The special term being sought is spatial, not spacial.
Please refer to the cartoon about grammerhell to comprehend.
Spacial is an accepted variant.
Just sayin' no harm no foul.
One of the (dis)advantages of spending most of one's life close to the same locality is being able to remember the decrepit shed that was replaced by the new shed which was destroyed in a fire and replaced by the store building that later was torn down to be replaced by the strip mall that now has gone to crap and needs to be visited by a big yellow stake-eater. This leads to oldtimers challenging each others memories with "bet you don't remember .........".
Holy Cow, post: 350763, member: 50 wrote: One of the (dis)advantages of spending most of one's life close to the same locality is being able to remember the decrepit shed that was replaced by the new shed which was destroyed in a fire and replaced by the store building that later was torn down to be replaced by the strip mall that now has gone to crap and needs to be visited by a big yellow stake-eater. This leads to oldtimers challenging each others memories with "bet you don't remember .........".
I have a "bet you don't remember" story:
The semi-suburban area around the Cash homestead was originally small acreages with a couple of large farms spattered in there for flavor. As the years rolled by development took its toll on all the "original" buildings and houses...and roads. One of the section line road intersections use to be just dirt roads with, in my memory, just a pole and sheet iron lean-to fruit stand on one corner. It belonged to a fella named "Abner" who sold fruit and veggies from his truck patch in the summer and Christmas trees in the winter.
One year (I was in school, because I saw it from the school bus) Abner put up an almost 40' steel pipe in the ground and guyed it off with lights to look like a huge Christmas tree. It stayed for a number of years; how many I couldn't tell you. But it outlived the fruit stand for a good ling time and I guess somebody eventually got rid of it.
Fast forward almost twenty-five years and I'm a surveyor. The intersection has turned into a 5 and 6 lane controlled mess with shops and buildings all over. They're widening the intersection (again!) and I'm doing the staking. A new return into the strip mall has been planned and the excavation revealed a torched-off flush with the ground 6" steel pipe. It took me a few minutes of looking around, but I soon realized it was what was left of Abner's Christmas tree.
The inspectors and engineers scratched their heads. Their best guess was an old water well, possibly an old unrecorded gas well. Change orders were signed and the contractor hired a remediation outfit to remove the upper 20' of casing and "plug" whatever kind of well it was. I laughed and told the super what I thought it was. He told me if I was right there would be a lot of mad people because of the delay and expense.
They finally excavated and pulled up about 8 to 10 feet of the bottom of Abner's old pipe Christmas tree...with some really lousy concrete crumbling off the end. The environmental remediation outfit walked away with probably $40k.
I remember thinking Abner never made that much money the whole time his fruit stand was there....
This winter I'm working for a Surveyor I last worked for 7 years ago before I joined the Army. Right before school let out I gave him a call to see if he needed any help around the holidays to finish up any work and he said he would be able to fit me into a couple of jobs he's finishing up right now. When I first worked for him he wasn't quite licensed yet, and we did all the work ourselves. Now he owns the firm and not much has changed except that it's a 4 man operation with 2 professionals in the office and 2 guys working in the field. Still, I have an odd feeling of nostalgia riding around in my old stomping grounds, once again surveying in the area where I first caught a flare for this work.
This post made me think about that a little bit more. The works not always fun, and sometimes it's downright aggravating. Some things have changed over there, but overall it is still a small firm with the pleasantries and unpleasantries of working in a small office. Right now the bane of my existence is wondering if I need a jacket every day and whether or not I'm going to get all the work done before the rain finds our truck. Louisiana winter is pleasant compared with most places on Earth, but the rain makes for an upsetting day when nothing else seems to want to work as planned.
A SummerÛªs Day Survey
It must have been in the summer around 1984 or so, that I went out to survey a 5 acre parcel in a small town in Nacogdoches County when I met the old man. We noticed as we drove up past the real estate sign, that the place was as neat as a pin, fenced in with an old pattern of woven wire fencing with wooden gates that had at one time been painted with white wash. Although the white wash had long ago began to flake off, the gates still hung true and stood as evidence that the old man built things right and kept things well maintained. He had a few watermelons at the dirt driveway entrance for sale on a small wooden bench. Not real big melons and not a lot of them, the kind of melons that really were grown in a garden and were more than were needed, so they were up for sale. The house and yard were shaded by large sycamore trees and the coolness of the morning made you want to just sit back and enjoy the day.
The old man came out as we drove up, seemingly happy to have some company. We explained that we were there to survey the place and of course he offered to show us around. It didn't take long to see the 5 acre tract, it was all well fenced with no brush or briars, which is unusual for East Texas, but pretty much the norm for an old retired man with lots of time on his hands. We saw the garden spot that was still producing all the vegetables that could be possibly be grown in East Texas. He also had a small orchard with fig trees, peach trees and blackberry vines and we also saw a small fenced area for some calves, a hog pen and chicken yard with laying boxes. Although there was no livestock or chickens present, it was obvious that they had only been moved out recently.
In short, the old man had almost everything that you needed to be self sufficient in East Texas. As we walked back to the truck to begin the survey, one of the crewmen, not meaning to be nosey, asked the old man why anyone would ever want to sell such a fine place. When we got to the truck, the old man paused and told us that he and his wife had bought the place many years ago and had spent that many years working together to build the place into what it was. They had not only raised their family there, together they had raised most of the food that they needed and either sold or canned whatever was left. Although it was not their only source of food or money as he had a job in town, it had surely helped to supplement their livelihood.
He went on telling us that the kids had grown up and left many years before and that his wife had died that past winter. He told us that he had been keeping up the place by himself that spring, but that it was just not the same without his wife. He said that he not only missed her terribly, but he was very lonely and being in the house and on the land that they worked together just seemed to make his loneliness even more unbearable. He was selling the place and moving to the coast to live with his daughter and even though he said that he didn't think much of living on the coast, he was somewhat looking forward to reconnecting with his daughter again.
We finished surveying the job fairly quickly that day and as we left that afternoon, he saw us off by giving us each one of the watermelons. I remember that we tried to only take one, but he insisted that we each get one. There was three of us and only three melons and we didn't want take them all. But he said that he would be gone in about two weeks and that his garden was about done putting out melons and he didn't think he would be selling anymore. Besides that, he would be busy packing up and probably wouldn't have the time to sell anymore if he did have them. Seems like we talked about what a fine day it had been all the way back to the office and of course, retold the story when we got back and proudly showed off our melon trophies.
I guess it was a busy summer that year, because we didn't think much about that day until we had a job down that same road early that fall. As we turned down the road, we all suddenly remembered that great place we surveyed that past summer. We wondered if old man had made the adjustment to living on the coast and wondered if the new owners had been able to keep up the place as well as the old man had.
As we drove past the place, we all looked up into the place to our horror to see only a burned up pile where the old man's house had once stood. The tops of the sycamore trees that had once shaded the house had been burned out and the whole place looked as if it hadn't been lived in for years. I recall that it was all we could talk about while we surveyed that morning and since it was out in the countryside, there was no one around to ask what happened.
At lunch, even though we all had carried our lunch and drinks, we made a special trip back to a Mom and Pop store at the small town and went in to buy a drink. When we checked out, we asked the clerk if he had been around for long and he said yes, a few years. We told him that we had surveyed the old man's place last summer and asked if he had known the old man. The clerk only nodded his head yes, not speaking a word. We told him that we noticed that the place had burned and asked if the old man was in it when it caught fire. Once again, the clerk only nodded his head yes. Only one last question remained and we had to ask it, did the old man make it out of the burning house. This time, the clerk looked down and slowly shook his head no.
Seems like we never did talk much about that summer's day survey again.
Ooooooooooh, my!
Jeff Opperman, post: 350788, member: 306 wrote: ..Seems like we never did talk much about that summer's day survey again.
Good memory, Jeff. Sadly, not all of life's last chapters are good ones.
I've often wondered why it is that we are the ones that get to sing the requiem for peoples' life work and their ties to the land. Although he's gone, the old man lives on in your story.
paden cash, post: 350793, member: 20 wrote: Good memory, Jeff. Sadly, not all of life's last chapters are good ones.
I've often wondered why it is that we are the ones that get to sing the requiem for peoples' life work and their ties to the land. Although he's gone, the old man lives on in your story.
We get to sing the requiems because we are what remains when someone goes away. Their legacy and how it touched and shaped us is what we have left.
When my dad passed about 5 years ago, after his funeral services, someone said to me, "I'll bet your dad loved that service. It was great seeing everyone there." And while I appreciated the sentiment, I said, "Funerals are for the living. My dad is no longer concerned for what goes on here." I wasn't meaning to be rude or uncaring. I was just thinking about the fact that whatever a person believes about death, whatever a person's views are concerning an afterlife and such, those of us still here just do what we can do to remember that there is now a vacancy where there was once something. We tell stories, sing songs, write poetry, hang pictures, or whatever to recall those who are no longer there.
Stories are how we connect the past to today and maybe hope to shape the future. And all of them, happy or sad, are awesome!
Holy Cow, post: 350337, member: 50 wrote: The special term being sought is spatial, not spacial.
Please refer to the cartoon about grammerhell to comprehend.
Robert Hill, post: 350350, member: 378 wrote: Spacial is an accepted variant.
Just sayin' no harm no foul.
Well, the truth is that I should have proofread my post! So it is a fair cop.
Then again, my mom said that I should have been an astronaut since I always seemed to be taking up space!
Another great story.
We all have witnessed things like this, some more than others, but mostly we don't notice or remember the details that make the story great. Or maybe we just can't make that stuff up. And most of us certainly can't write it out like that.
Thanks, Paden Cash. Keep them coming. Publish!