Chapter 2

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.