“The RoseBouquet”

That warmer weather I predicted last week did come on the weekend, and the temperatures are much less severe this week. However, to use an old proverb, there is a fly in the ointment. With these temperatures we are dealing with a lot of fog-ice and driving is more treacherous.

Ah, do you want to hear about my brother Ernie’s visit? That turned out to be quite a huge blessing to me.

Ernie is a diesel mechanic and foreman of all the mechanics at the big Jade Transport in Winnipeg. They have a fleet of tanker trucks that carry chemicals across North America. As a little side ministry for the church he and Penny attend, Ernie has for the third year now, offered to drive the bus full of teens who want to come to the Youth Retreat weekend here in Saskatoon, at a Christian college. They put him up at a motel for the Friday and Saturday nights, and on Sunday, right after lunch he makes the 10 hour drive back to Winnipeg, but this means he has to find his own activities on Saturday. Last year we sat around and visited.

This time I warned him to bring work clothes, and when he called to say he was up on Saturday, about 10 am, I went to pick him up, and we drove to Home Depot where we weighed the pros and cons of which insulation to buy for my basement. I thought I would have to buy some wood for framing and then put these panels of pink stryofoam between the studs.

No, Ernie assured me, that’s now how it’s done any more. We have to glue the styrofoam sheets right to the cement walls of the basement. We settled on the half -inch thick sheets, and by my calculations we would need 21 sheets. (My math wasn’t quite right, but it was more than enough).

The sales clerk wrapped plastic wrap around the bundle at checkout and then Ernie tied this 8 foot x 2 foot stack up on the roof of my car with some ropes I had in the trunk. I drove home carefully, and then we managed to get that through the right angles of my front porch doors, and Ernie took them downstairs while I whipped up a quick lunch. (I had already put potatoes into a crock for supper).

It turned out the old caulking gun of Dad’s I had bent in Ernie’s hands, so I had to dash out to a hardware store for another and a can of “Great Stuff” as Ernie really didn’t want to mix cement to fill in the cracks in the basement walls. After a while I had to go out to buy more of those tubes of carpenter’s glue that he put into the caulking gun, and by which Ernie applied the pink sheets to the walls.

I had thought that if he helped with the south wall I would be very grateful for a good day’s work, but I guess Ernie is also a child of our mother, for he persisted and we also got the east and west walls done except for one small patch by the stairs and an short area where I had stacked up a lot of stuff and there was no place to move it to get into that corner. (The north side faces the crawl space that is almost as big as the basement area. It has a hill of dirt so that you have to crawl around on your knees if you want to go in there. I don’t!)

Instead of putting the panels up vertically, Ernie put them up horizontally, because the basement walls are only a little more than six feet high. This made them go much further. When I have finished those two small corners, I will still have two panels left.

At 5:30 I had a supper of mashed potatoes and minute steaks with mushroom gravy ready and we took it to our brother Tom’s where we ate together at his table. We had quite an amicable visit - us three siblings. I feel very pleased about that day!

I found a poem the other day that strikes me as a great Valentine’s poem of the kind I would like to write. So I’m going to use it today in Ruthe’s Roses. May it bless you too.