January 27,2019
When we lived on 28th street, the house was made
of stucco and my father regularly painted it for his mother – the home owner. If
you don’t know what stucco is, it is like cement but rough. If you look at a
snowbank after the plows come through and you see all lumps of different sizes
left on the banks, it is like magnified stucco.
In order to paint stucco, you not only have to brush but you
have to tap the brush to paint the spaces between the lumps. It wasn’t odd for
Daddy to come in splattered all over with paint from the incessant
tap-tap-tapping of the brush on the material.
Mary and I always wanted to help, but that would have been a
disaster waiting to happen. We did occasionally get to help, but ended up
splashed with bits of paint. So to get our creative juices flowing and our
desire to help satisfied, we were allowed to paint the sidewalk.
This entailed my Dad getting some old paint brushes and
giving us a bucket of water. Then we painted the sidewalk squares with water,
one square at a time, till all was covered. As it dried, we imagined that the
cement was covered with a fresh, new coat of water/paint and looked so much
better. But it was no brighter or nicer than after a rainstorm.
We didn’t care – we painted while dad painted and when done,
the house and sidewalk were brand spanking new.
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