Making My Mark

F’s building an outdoor table for Pili’s courtyard.  Pili is Spanish and lives nearby.  F & Pili met at the beach one day – and the conversation starter?  Well if you guessed me, you’d be wrong (just this once).  They were both picking up rubbish.

Since then Pili has been my catsitter once and comes round to visit from time to time.  F has done catsitting at Pili’s place too – she thinks I didn’t know that but she came home each day smelling of kittens. 

Humans are suckers for kittens.

Recently F has been helping Pili make a courtyard garden at the back of Pili’s apartment block.  I’ve been there; I’ve seen that challenge – it probably hasn’t been a garden since a house stood on the site …..when? 1950’s? 60’s?

It has one tree.  F calls it a cabbage tree.  It looks like a cabbage tree, but that is just wishful thinking on F’s part.  It isn’t. I suspect she gets homesick sometimes.  Real cabbage trees grow in NZ, and in a few English gardens.  Their leaves jam up lawnmowers. ‘Nuff said.

Pili’s grandmother planted the tree 30 years ago.

The rest of the courtyard looks like very old stone walls and rubble from building sites: bricks, broken tiles, pieces of marble, lumps of concrete (cemento in Spanish), half-buried steel reinforcing rods and solidified bags of lime and cement.  It’s a weird shape, gets very little sun (which could turn out to be it’s blessing) and it slopes.  Part of it is exposed rock, the rest is buried in layers of archaeological plastic.  Rubbish occasionally gets lobbed off balconies into this yard.

Garden that!

ANYWAY – the table…..it’s a square of plywood being painted white and lying on a sheet of plastic on our back balcony.  Flat surface, pristinely white, back balcony, middle of the night, hot weather, open doors…..