One of the (dis) advantages of working for someone who doesn’t know me very well is that she assumes that I can do just about anything. Take yesterday, for instance. When I arrived she showed me where she wanted a brick wall built, and then three separate brick flower boxes all at different levels. I looked with horror as she pointed and then I said, “There’s no way I can do that without mortar.”
She had already thought of that and bought mortar over the weekend.Curses, foiled again. I figured that she deserved fair warning so I said, “Uh, I’ve never done this before.”

“That’s O.K., there are instructions on the package” she replied and walked away.

For years now I’ve seen Alex do just about anything he wanted to do, and do it very well, even if he had never been taught. It’s infuriating. My Mom claims I am visual, maybe I am just slow. I seem to remember seeing something on TV where a man was placing bricks down, spreading mortar, and then placing more bricks down. I decide what the hell? I’m winging it baby; I am winging it. And I did. I was rather pleased with the finished result, even if it was far from perfect, but I did it with my own two hands. When June came out to take a look she looked for a long time. I was afraid what the words would be when they came, but she nodded, smiled, and said, “I like it. It looks rustic, just the way that I wanted it to.” Then she tells me to come in and wash up for lunch. It always cracks me up the way that she tells me to wash my hands before I eat, as if I am a little kid. As I was washing my hands I started to wonder what she meant by rustic. Is rustic even a compliment? Here I go again, picking conversations apart, word by word. Why do I torture myself in this way?

Good lord, look at what I found when I was doing a search for rustic.

1. Of, relating to, or typical of country life or country people. See Synonyms at rural.

2. a. Lacking refinement or elegance; coarse.

b. Charmingly simple or unsophisticated.

3. Made of unfinished or roughly finished wood: rustic furniture.

4. Having a rough or textured appearance; rusticated. Used of masonry.

rustic - awkwardly simple and provincial; “bumpkinly country boys”; “rustic farmers”; “a hick town”; “the nightlife of Montmartre awed the unsophisticated tourists”

bumpkinly, hick, unsophisticated

provincial - characteristic of the provinces or their people; “deeply provincial and conformist”; “in that well-educated company I felt uncomfortably provincial”; “narrow provincial attitudes”

Oh well, hopefully it will all look better when the flowers get bigger. Tomorrow, who knows what she’ll have me do?

Maybe I’ll spin straw into gold.