Ryan did as he’d told Merrick he would. The mornings for the next week were spent marking where the path would go, and then taking up the lawn in the pegged-out area, as well as the old path. He hadn’t realized until he started quite how hard that would be. I’m going to have muscles on top of muscles before I’m finished. He looked at the piles of flagstones. Then I get to lay those. It’ll be the twelfth of never before the path is completed.
Thankfully, his afternoons, before going to work, were spent in a less labor-intensive way. He haunted the local parks and playgrounds, looking for subjects for his ‘old people and children’ series. He had decided to do it as impressionistic watercolors, so he didn’t have to ask for permissions from the people he sketched, or in the case of the childr
