Every Third Thought Read Online Free PDF

Estates refugees. With whom, between sets, we’d shake our heads at the approaching first anniversary of our erstwhile community’s destruction and compare notes on our intentions with respect to it. The younger, more vigorous Simpsons—Pete an associate dean at the college, Debbie an associate librarian—whose home in H.B.E.’s detached-house Rockfish Reach neighborhood had been sorely damaged but not altogether wrecked by T. S. Giorgio’s tornado, were already busily rebuilding an improved version of
it and helping to plan a new, ecologically “green” Heron Bay Estates, but were concerned that the downturn in the nation’s housing market and the upturn of its mortgage-foreclosure rate, while not yet damaging to them personally, might well put a freeze on the development’s redevelopment.
    Us?
    Damned if we knew, we shrugged. Much as we had enjoyed our nearly two decades there, we doubted whether we had interest or energy enough this late in our day to rebuild on our own initiative. If some general contractor re-did our “old” Blue Crab Bight neighborhood (an unlikely prospect in the present slump), perhaps we’d re-buy there in what was becoming ever more a buyer’s market. More likely we’d just sit tight in our rented condo; maybe buy it if its Floridian owners chose to unload at a duly modest figure.
    “Unless our B.M. Move comes first,” one of us would interject at this point: H.B.E. slang for its older residents’ notuncommon next-to-last relocation across the Matahannock to the same developer’s Bayview Manor Continuing Care facility. After which, the grave. And meanwhile , as G. I. Newett believes he was saying?
    Meanwhile, he’ll forge in the smithy of his head-banged but not yet quite fossilized fancy one more effing O.F. Fiction, by George, this one having to do with, let’s see . . . fall-falls? The autumnal equi-knocks of a tottering talester seasoned by life’s seasons? By his life’s seasons: its Spring, its Summer, its Fall, and fast-approaching Winter? . . .

    Thus maundered he, while Amanda repaired her villanelle (so she would report somewhile later) and the couple’s mortal days ticked by to 29 October 2007, the eve of the eve of All Hallows Eve. In Stratford and environs, a day not unlike those just before and after: nearly warm enough for shorts in the afternoon, then cool enough that evening to light the condo’s gas fireplace while attending the usual cheerless news from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq despite the White House’s rote reassurances that our recent troop “surge” was making progress. To our home and/or campus offices after breakfast; to our classes/chores/whatever after lunch. After dinner, an informal anniversary-memorial gathering of H.B.E. survivors organized by Dean Pete and Debbie Simpson in one of the college’s function-rooms borrowable for town/gown occasions, whereat the disaster’s only fatalities (a couple about our age, crushed in the rubble of their faux-Georgian house in Rockfish Reach) were duly saluted and other storm-trauma memories shared, along with decaf coffee and differing opinions regarding the development’s future. And after that , back “home” to enjoy our pre-bed time in customary Todd/Newett fashion: an hour or so of separated reading (Mandy comfortably chaired in the condo’s guest-bedroom-cum-improvised-home-office with a new biography of her beloved Emily Dickinson, G.I.N. couched before the afore-lit fireplace with some young upstart’s deservedly acclaimed first novel), followed by a reunited, port-winenightcapped hour of video entertainment (in this instance, the DVD’d first half of one of Jane Austen’s alliteratively titled,
social-class-driven, handsomely filmed chef d’oeuvres : Pride and Prejudice , was it? Sense and Sensibility ? Manors and Manners, anyhow), followed by a bedtime goodnight embrace and, for Yrs Truly, about two hours’ sleep before the first of his thricea-night old-fart