Another Cyclical Saturday Up On the roof at Home with Mom Nature

A Saturday afternoon at home w/ Josh downstairs finishing his Eagle Scout stuff, Anita cleaning inside somewhere, Shakun & Leah off to Fatima's for their massages, Ez at Phora to play soccer or basketball and me, the Dad, taking a few hours of relaxation upstairs after cleaning the overgrown ivy and a summer's debris along the rooftop molded gutters.

When Ez came home from Lyle's about 11 am and found me up above the living room, wrestling and tearing the slender, elastic lines of ivy that had overwhelmed the rooftop defenses, he chuckled and said, "you're still on the roof!"

As I had been about 8 pm last night, when the electricity was out for a couple of hours, lying on the cotton pillows on the wooden bench in the open loggia toward the backside of the living room roof.

Ez'd called, "Dad, where are you?" When I answered, he asked, "Do you have 20 or 50 rupees?" "No," I responded, "I'm up here in my boxers; the money's on the desk in front of the computer."

"Ok, I'm going down to Budhanilkantha w/ Lyle to get some momos for dinner. Then, we're going to Lyle's house."

So, a day later, Ez was amused to find his occasionally misplaced Dad still up on the roof, where he'd left him 15 hours earlier...

But, when you have such a plethora of flat roofs with verdant, rugged hillsides all around & the wide open Kathmandu valley below, lights twinkling in the darkness, or billowy day-time clouds on the horizon, well, methinks, that's there's hardly a better place to contemplate the wonder of it all while continuing one's perpetual struggle with the fierce, lush, semi-tropical invasion of monsoon foliage that seeks to swarm the ramparts of our precious homes, drain pipes and existence.

Nature will win, of course, in the Prime Mover's final, epic teleological, ontological & metaphysical cinemagraphic end -- but that's a long way off yet from today's Saturday, and the day to day struggle is often full of joy while Ms. Bountiful Naturette is agreeable enough to temporarily bend her ineluctable florid ambition to our thoughts and desires in creating a bit of horiticultural beauty around us.

After all, without Mother Earth's eagerness to keep spreading her tendrils, leaves, seeds & roots, we'd be a lonely race of lonely people in a very barren world, indeed.

Now, back to the barricades!

But, first, where did I put my pruning scissors?