Talisker nudged his hand and leaned against his leg as Rennie stood looking at the front of the house, thinking about how he had tentatively touched the newly painted deck, just as his father had gently tested the surface of the boat, to be sure it was dry. If he hurried, he had calculated, it [...]
Archive for the ‘Part One’ Category
Part One•Section XXXV•Paragraph 1
Posted in Part One, Section 35, tagged chrysanthemum, disapproval, fiction, sisal on November 3, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
One•XXXIV•4
Posted in Part One, Section 34, tagged autumn foliage, Boston Common, centreboard, hull, rigging, sloop, Storrow Lagoon on October 26, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Rennie’s father had shown him how to prime the model, once it was mostly completed, and had let the boy try his hand at varnishing and painting.
“All it takes,” John had told him, “is a concentrated gaze and a steady hand.”
After varnishing the deck and mast, they had applied strips of masking tape to define [...]
One•XXXIV•3
Posted in Part One, Section 34, tagged Beach Boys, Sloop John B, Kingston Trio, John Alden Sloop, model ship building on October 19, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
A few days into the project, Rennie’s sister had put on a record with the Beach Boys singing “Sloop John B.” Rennie and his father had gleefully sung along, altering the lyrics ad libitum (and so adding to the general, and atypical in their household, hilarity):
We come on the Sloop John A…
Each [...]
One•XXXIII•4
Posted in Part One, Section 33, tagged Adirondack chair, Cambridge, fiction, John Alden, sloop, wooden model shipbuilding on September 14, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Arden would be arriving home in two days and, he had figured, there would be just enough time before that to paint the porch deck and the two Adirondack chairs that he had found discarded at the side of the road earlier that summer. Putting the finishing touches on the baluster’s post caps, [...]
One•XXXIII•3
Posted in Part One, Section 33, tagged Assam tea, balustrade, capital, Celtic loaf, marmalade, pilasters on September 7, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The next morning, he had been awakened early by Talisker’s licking his hand. He had brewed himself a mug of strong Assam tea and hewn a thick slice of dark, nutty Celtic loaf, which he had toasted and slathered with soft butter and fine-cut lime marmalade (with Arden and the girls away, there [...]
One•XXXIII•2
Posted in Part One, Section 33, tagged baluster, balustrade, cricket, fiction, pilaster, porch on August 31, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
On arriving home, he had spread out a tarpaulin on the porch floor, set up a ladder and then, after carefully cutting in the edges of the beadboarded ceiling with Dimity, he had poured some of the thick cream-colored paint into a pan and started coating a small area with a roller that [...]
Part One•Section XXXII•Paragraph1
Posted in Part One, Section 32, tagged Borrowed Light, Farrow & Ball, Folly Green, moccasins, Tanner's Brown on August 17, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
When he returned to the store to purchase the paint, Rennie had felt a pang of disappointment to discover that the salesperson was a curt, tanned, middle-aged man, meticulously dressed in a crisp, short-sleeved, Borrowed Light shirt, chinos and expensive-looking moccasins, rather than the young woman with the Folly Green eyes and gentle, mellifluous voice whose hand [...]