On a Zingerman’s run yesterday, my sweetheart and I spent extra time in the Bakehouse parking lot, watching a team of men hang an awning over a door. The awning was bright purple, a pleasing shape, and apparently quite heavy. The team putting it up seemed like men who had worked together many times and who knew what they were about. It also seemed clear that no awning job is exactly like another. Each job requires a degree of figuring it out as you go along.
When we first saw them, they were using three ladders: two step ladders and a straight ladder. On any given trip up or down, a man might use one or two ladders. The first time someone stepped from one ladder to another, I thought I must have imagined it. But it happened periodically. Seamlessly. As if choreographed.
Having completed some necessary process on the left side of the awning, the team opened another step ladder on the right. Not too long after that, they deployed another straight ladder. We weren’t entirely sure how many men were working, as the awning, we discovered, was large enough to hide an entire person. There were three or four installers, all busy, all calm.
When we pulled out of the parking lot, the awning was tentatively attached to the building, with the team working on securing it. In the rearview mirror, we could see them taking another straight ladder off their truck. There were several more purple awnings still to go.
We got together with neighbors last weekend for wine and cheese, and a guest joined the usual suspects. Meg recently joined the faculty at Auburn University and is experiencing some culture shock at living in the South after previous sojourns in California and Michigan. One of the most startling aspects of teaching at Auburn, she says, is the number of students who have told her that what she teaches isn’t important to them, that they’ll just be joining Daddy’s business when they graduate, that the only reasons they’re at college are to join a fraternity and find a suitable young woman.
She’s not letting that attitude hold her back from her long-term plan, which is to emigrate. She grew up in the United States, but her parents are Australian and have since returned to Australia. Her sister lives there now, too, and she wants to join them. So, I wanted to know, do you speak Australian English? You mean, the slang? she answered. Yes.
In Australia, she said, the word hoochie denotes a light tarpaulin. Is it spelled the same way? we asked. “Yes,” she affirmed. “I looked it up. Also, thongs.”
“Yes?”
“Beach shoes,” she explained, “flip-flops.” This caused a flurry of comments, some to the effect that that’s what flip-flops used to be called here, before the advent of thong underwear and bikinis. The first word our family learned for flip-flops, when they first turned up here, was zoris. Our uncle, who’d been stationed in Japan, told us that’s what they were called, and we went with it.
Meg also showed us photographs of Australian birds and wildlife that she’d taken on visits to family. The birds were the most amazing colors. Australian robins, kingfishers, and wrens, for instance, look like our robins, kingfishers, and wrens in fancy dress.
She also mentioned that she’ll have to wait to make the move until her elderly cat is no more, as she wouldn’t be permitted to take her to the part of Australia where she wants to live. Cats there prey on the country’s small marsupials. Name some small marsupials, we asked. She did, illustrating most of them from her store of snapshots.
She stopped at one photo, laughed, and showed it to me. “There’s a roo in this picture. See if you can find it.” She’d taken the shot from her parents’ porch. No wonder she wants to live there.
My honey and I dined at White Lotus yesterday evening, and happened to be there when a staffer was closing the umbrellas over the patio tables. From table to table she went, turning umbrella cranks. All would go well until the umbrella was nearly closed, at which point she would be engulfed inside the bright red predator.
Her arm wasn’t long enough to fold an umbrella all the way down, while remaining outside it. As it was, had to kneel on the patio each time, to keep enough of her body was outside the umbrella that she could extricate the rest from its tightening clutches. It was a day for awnings going up and umbrellas coming down.
11 September 2026