I was at the house. The garage door was wide open, and all my lawn service equipment was out in the driveway. It was quite a collection. I had an assembly line going.
At the base of the driveway two of my workers were cleaning the stuff as best they could. I was then handed the item. I ran it a bit, to make sure it worked. Then I siphoned out the gas if there was a lot left.
I did not store my equipment with gas left in it. Unleaded gasoline, even with stabilizer added, is a conglomeration of stuff that does not age well.
Finally, there was Brenda Thomas. She was the girl I had met a few weeks ago, who had fixed my edge trimmer. She did the final look-see, and made adjustments to equipment. She replaced parts, did tune ups ... You name it, and she could fix it.
I was finally done with the last of my bigger mowers. It was a self-propelled one, with a wheeled platform you stood on, that was towed behind it. I used it on the bigger jobs. Seemed to run fine to me, but Brenda intercepted it.
"Didn't you hear it while it was running? Sheesh! You must be deaf," Brenda said to me.
"Hear what? It sounded fine to me," I replied.
"Good thing you hired me to look after you! You would have had a very expensive piece of junk, if you'd continued running this for long," Brenda said.
She started the mower, and ran it up to the garage. She started unbolting everything as I watched. She hummed while she was taking the mower apart. Soon she had pieces of it everywhere. Then she did whatever it was that she did. Soon, she was putting it back together.
She looked so cute! Her hands were greasy, and a bit of grease or oil was on her face. God, this girl was just amazing.
I heard a dog barking, way off down the street. I knew instantly that it was barking at my mother.
The barking was a greeting to someone it recognized. It invited my mom to stop and play. Of course neither my mother, nor anyone else, would understand what it was saying.
I was still amazed at the world that had opened up to me so recently.
I made my way down the driveway leaving Brenda to happily putter with my mower. Mom shortly pulled up at the curb and got out of the car.
"Sean Taggart, what have you done to my driveway?" My mother asked after seeing the equipment strewn all over the driveway.
"Don't worry mom, I will have it cleaned up and out of your way in about an hour," I told her.
She just shook her head, grabbed her briefcase out of the car, and made her way up the driveway. She paused to look at Brenda, giving me a look.
"Mom, this is my mechanic, Brenda Thomas. Brenda? My mom," I said brilliantly.
"Nice to meet you, dear. Sean after you get your mess cleaned up, why don't you bring your girlfriend in for a snack? We will be eating late tonight," Mom said and turned away.
"Girlfriend? But, wait a minute,"
It was too late. I was talking to the closed door by now.
I heard a giggle and looked at Brenda. She had a smile on her face, and was starting to laugh at me.
"You should see your face. What am I, a fate worse than death or something?" Brenda said while laughing at me.
I chuckled after a moment. Oh well, if Brenda could live with being mistaken for my girlfriend, I could.
An hour later all my equipment was clean. It had been gone over to Brenda's satisfaction, and put away. Brenda cleaned up at the sink in the back of the garage.
"Come on, Boyfriend. Let's get that snack your mom promised us. I'm starved," Brenda said with a cute grin that caused her dimples to show up.
In an odd way, it was Mom's crack about her being my girlfriend that sort of got me to ask her out. We went to different schools, but we could date on weekends, and that's what we did.
It was during this period that I started having dreams again, about flying. This time, though, they were more detailed. It always started out the same. I was at the top of a hill or the lip of a valley. I was grasping a stone while looking down.
In the dream, I was always young. I was about four years old, or so, I guess. As I grasped the stone, I heard the rustle of wings. Birds, such as I had never seen before flew over my head, and down into the valley.
That's when I heard it, the voice, but it wasn't talking. It was more that I sort of felt, rather than heard it. It vibrated through the stone.
"Fly, youngling! Fly 'An Rathad'," it finished in Scottish.
The voice was telling me to fly the road. In my dream, I did! I started running down the hill. Then I lifted into the air a bit. My feet were always pointed towards the ground, and my arms were stretched way out. In my dream I was laughing at the thrill of it all. Somehow I was held up! I flew!
In my dream, other birds were flying close to me. They were birds of a type I had never seen before. Streams of them were with me, and all of them were going the same way I was.
They were huge birds, but they were of such a 'sky blue' color, as to disappear against the sky, if they had flown higher.
I flew over treetops and kept going, laughing all the way. Finally, I reached a gathering place at the bottom of the valley, where the birds were landing. I watched as they landed. I copied their wing motions as best I could. I too landed, but roughly.
In my dream I sat up and listened. All was quiet except for a thrumming sound that seemed to come from the ground beneath me. The birds looked at me, and I looked at them.
It was almost dark, now. I could see some people dressed in robes. They were walking towards me. Shortly, one robed figure gave a cry, and ran to me. She scattered the birds that were around me.
"Sean, me lad! How did ye come to be here, child?" my grandmother asked me.
I woke up, then. My heart was beating fast. I was still feeling the thrill of having flown. I sighed. I was not going to get back to sleep anytime soon.
October was a cooling off time for our weather. The summer wound down, but we still had nice days. It would not really start getting cold until the end of the month, anyway.
Brenda had asked me to pick her up at her house, and I was just pulling up for our date.
It was Saturday morning, and I had arrived about twenty minutes early. I knocked on the door, as I didn't like ringing the bell this early. The door soon opened, and Brenda's mom let me in.
"Good morning, Sean. Brenda will be with you shortly, she is just finishing getting dressed," she told me.
We made our way to the kitchen, and she poured a cup of coffee for each of us from the pot that always seemed to be going. We sat at the kitchen table and talked a bit, then just sat and drank our coffee.
I heard a voice say 'Mother' and I looked up. Brenda had come down the hallway from another room. She was not dressed. I gawked at her. She screeched to a halt when she saw me, turned, and fled back down the hallway. Her shirt was flapping, as her panty clad rear end was disappearing.
I flushed a multi-hued red color as I looked at Brenda's mother.
"Oh, dear. I'd better go talk to her," she said.
She put her cup down, and left the room.
This left me thinking about what I had just seen.
A picture formed in my head of Brenda. Her shirt was unbuttoned and a brown nipple peeked out. There was no bra. Her little blue bikini panties looked really cute. She had been buttoning the cuff of a shirtsleeve, and had been looking at that when she had come in.
God! She had been so ... sexy!
I'm not sure how much time passed, but Brenda and her mom finally came back into the kitchen.
"See? Your lucky young man is still here," Brenda's mom said as they entered.
"MOM!" Brenda wailed, turning red.
"Please don't be upset, Brenda. I have the picnic stuff in the truck, and everything is ready to go," I said, trying to defuse the situation.
Ten minutes later we were on our way. I made my way to the highway then turned west. According to Brenda, we had a good hour's travel time until we reached the turn off for her family's cabin. I was looking forward to it.
"Aren't you going to say anything?" She asked me.
"Um, about what?" I asked her, playing dumb.
"You know about what!" she said, punching my arm.
"You're really beautiful," was my reply.
"That's it? I'm beautiful? No other comments about the way I was dressed?" she asked me.
"You mean undressed?" I asked with a grin.
She punched me again.
"You goof!" she said with a smile.
We made good time. The pick up ran like a top, of course. Brenda had worked it over for me just the week before. I followed her directions, and we wound up at a large cabin in the middle of a wood. I liked the place. It was peaceful.
We got out of the truck. I went to the back, got the picnic stuff out, and carried it into the cabin. It was a real log cabin, even though it had been built only about fifteen years ago. So it was fairly new, yet it still looked good from the outside.
Inside, it was a cross between modern and rustic. The living room had an over sized fireplace. There was also a stove of some kind, of a sort of heating type. It also had electric lights, but the power to the cabin was turned off, right now.
"Dad had this place connected to the grid, about five years ago. This place was built so we could come out winter, spring, summer, or fall, just like the song," Brenda said with a smile.
I nodded, and continued to carry the picnic items as I followed her into the kitchen. I set the stuff down on the kitchen table with a sigh of relief. The kitchen was spacious. It had a wood-burning stove, of all things. Not gas, not electric, but wood. Wow.
Brenda gave me the grand tour. I had to admit, it was a great place. It was sort of a combination of minimal modern décor, but everything was utilitarian.
After the tour, I could see where you could live in this place year round ... if you had too, or wanted too.
Edited by TeNderLoin