By: Selina Pedi-Smith, Pellere Foundation
Toni is asleep beside me in a blanket.
Toni, for the record, is our heritage turkey poult. We still don’t know whether Toni is a she or a he, so for now Toni is simply Toni: small, delightfully curious, and completely convinced that I exist for warmth and occasional preening. Toni imprinted on Don, hard, so his is the voice that causes the most turkey excitement, but I am the acceptable substitute when necessary. A few minutes ago, Toni pecked my finger, either to see if it was edible or to request further service, then pulled the blanket closer and settled back in. Every so often, one eye twitches slightly open at an odd noise. Then there is a chirp, a little trill, some determined burrowing, and sleep again.
A few days ago, I was knocking down a garage.
You may remember that the old garage at 403 W 2nd St had started reconsidering just how committed it was to being a garage at all. Once we removed the failing roof, one of the terracotta block walls began shifting and crumbling. It had apparently been relying pretty heavily on those rafters to hold itself together. So, rather than wait for a stiff wind to finish the job in an unacceptable manner, we gathered our volunteer crew, brought our skid steer, and went back to help it along.
There were about half a dozen of us in boots, glasses, and gloves, plus Don and the skid. The crumbling wall went down fairly willingly. We did our best to push it inward so most of the debris landed inside the footprint of the garage, rather than in the alley. Then Don started scooping. When he picked up rafters and old roofing, the rest of us pulled out anything worth saving. When he scooped terracotta block and rubble, we swept the street, picked up stray pieces of broken stuff, and generally tried to stay one step ahead of the next bucketful. Somewhere along the way, demolition finished and sorting began.
Toni has awakened long enough to make a few happy little trilling noises. She has also repositioned herself so that apparently even less of her body is exposed to the dangerous wilds beyond the blanket. Her eyes are closing again. Writing with a poult tucked in next to you is somewhat distracting, but adorable. I highly recommend it.
Anyway, by the end of our workday at 2nd St, the dumpster was completely full. The street and alley were as clean as we could possibly get them. The remaining garage base was about half filled with debris we couldn’t get rid of yet and half filled with a surprisingly tidy stack of century-old stone and brick. Those bits and bobs had already spent a century holding up one part of the property. There seemed no good reason to send them to a landfill when they could spend the next century doing something else. We ran out of dumpster before we ran out of garage rubble, so the rest had to wait for a new one to arrive this week.
For now, that old garage has one less wall trying to fall over, a pile of old stone waiting for its next assignment, and considerably fewer structural issues than it had last week. Because it has considerably less structure.
Toni, meanwhile, is sound asleep. Keyboard clacking must be soothing to a turkey.
Roots & Renewal is where the Pellere Foundation shares the people, projects and occasional mud behind our work. Read along here, check out the podcast on YouTube or Spotify, or find us at pellere.org.
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