Sandwiches

As we've noted before, the Tillmans of Horsehead Crating Company (our in-house Jerks-of-all-trades) have a pagan streak. And for some reason their flavor of paganism starts to simmer as the days get shorter and the nights get longer. Winter brings out their wildness and they tend to stay up all night doing Gods-know-what, sleeping all day. Not so good for work productivity. And us? We're more long-day, warm-night, sleep-with-the-windows-open types. We can get a little gloomy come winter when the bike rides get punishing and the roll-up door to the shop stays closed. So with the forecast calling for the first snow of the season in Denver this week, we're turning this Sandwich blog over to Clovis Tillman for a week of photos of evening, night and early-morning lights, to help us see some beauty in all that darkness. To cheer up our gloom, Clovis sent through a shot of this morning's sunrise in Cheesman park.

Rounding out a week of posts from in and around our shop compound, here's a last look for now. Clockwise from top left: the corner of the canopy over the pad—rusting steel beam and tube against the brilliant blue of the Colorado sky (our friend Morgan Barnes was once told that that rust-and-sky-blue combination in a sculpture of his made it a kind of "Hillbilly cock art"); the fall fruit of our shop Hawthorn; our beehives among the weeds against the back fence; and our Boston Ivy making steady progress on the block wall of the woodshop. All in all, a very fine place to work.

In case anyone was wondering, we've got the corner of Ellsworth and Galapago—our corner, thank you very much—locked down. No dispute from our neighbors: Gate City Moving on the southeast (good guys, super ramshackle scene, fresh gate); Palace Construction on the southwest (that ridiculous building should be in Tysons Corner, Virginia); our beloved Altieri Instrument Bags shares the northwest yard with us; and that enigma on the northeast (some City and County of Denver IT nerve center). They've all got more employees, bigger buildings, generators, flags, vehicles and what-have-you, but we've got little rubber chairs over the wire smack in the middle of the intersection. Game over. In green and gold, perfect for fall.

You get yourself a hook, a ring and a string and you've got yourself a bottomless waste of time. Next time you come by the shop we'll prove it to you. Hours, days will pass and if you're really good maybe you'll have exceeded the high bars as of this writing: seven of ten and five in a row. This endless, missless loop is a fantasy, sure, but a perfect game is possible. It's only a matter of time.

We've taken time out in the past to hold up our handsome honeybees as model workers. Hardly the first to do that, we know. But northern sea oats? Perhaps a stretch to think of them as workers but they are kicking ass out front of the shop, making themselves quite at home indeed. Propagating both sexually (these lovely seeds are evidence of that) and vegetatively (no sex needed here, just spreading underground via rhizomes like our friends the aspens), they've been gettin' biz-ay in the yard along Galapago. We spend the summer making a bunch of tables and chairs and what-not and they take over while we're not looking. Since he's a total freak for all translucent seeds, Clovis took a fistful of the seeds one-by-one into the slide scanner. A pair of scanner results here, a fancy-boy glamour shot of the oats out front to follow.

Another year of growth, another year of rust. That's the way with us and that's the way with our front garden and we're all better for it. The grasses E.B. Tillman set a couple years back have gone buck wild beside the walk and the aspens seem to have made some headway in their negotiations with the unstoppable ailanthus (Chinese sumac, Tree of Heaven, whatever) for a little direct sunlight against the Altieri building to the south. Plus that "db" is really popping off against the deep red of our rusting front wall. All is well. Below, views from outside looking in and inside looking out. More early fall photos from the shop compound all week.