Lord Luvvadukk (Part 2)

Turning away from the edge of the sun splintered porch, Luvvadukk took the four steps slowly to screen door and paused to hear the red tail hawk break the silence of thousands of crickets and grasshoppers playing their wings in the grass gone to seed.  The barn swallows shooting in and out of the open hayloft did not pause in their loops and the crickets did not cease.  In fact, the crickets and grasshoppers only seemed to grow louder in response to this encroach on their own wild chirping. The screen door slammed and settled on crazy hinges back to a perpetual ten centimeters ajar.  On loafers Luvvadukk was a silent man.  Not that there was a soul there to not hear him pad over the kitchen floor and into the work room.  Despite the silent tread, in the work room, some glass jars holding unassorted nails and screws bounced together and a fly took off and buzzed feebly against the sagging glass window panes.  The floor joists in the work room had had a spring ever since the house was built by Old Man Otto Luvvadukk circa 130 years ago.  Back in that time, as it is still, lumber was scarce, used sparingly, and the long boards for the floor joists had been given more than the customary spacing and the pillars in the center of the plan had been completely neglected or poorly secured to the timber and knocked over long ago by truant skunks and other wandering animals.  The deflection was only mildly alarming and Luvvadukk had no plans to crawl under the house to inspect the situation and definitely no desire to tear up the floor and make adjustments.  The floor decking was also original, faux tongue and groove cedar planking, scarred up badly from a century of hard boots and hard drinking and hard iron tools.  Nearly everyone in this county was a hard drinker and had hard boots and nearly everyone in this county had spent an evening in the Luvvadukk work room.  In his early years, before the town ran out of water, Luvvadukk was a jack of all trades, though strictly a hobbyist.  Folks with intractable problems came to him for quick and cheap fixes.  Lately though, Luvvadukk was turning away the few projects and problems that still came through the big red gates of the Luvvadukk estate, had trouble concentrating and was thinking less applied, more theoretical.  Sometimes he would find himself with a piece of wood in his hands, a door knob, or a trowel, or a box of salt, or a broken balloon and not know what to do with it or why he should do what was to be done in the first place, if that at all. This state of mind was puzzling and it was a puzzlement why this state was more frequently enveloping him as if it was a fog and he a golf course.  Luvvadukk thought that the fog was perhaps a consequence of his being there, but it was situational, it was a fog he walked into.  Outside the work room the air was clear, the sun was bright, and the atmosphere was not viscous, and Luvvadukk was always purposeful.