country_restoration tender_square what was the sense in getting cable when they were here so infrequently? she tried configuring a google play for streaming, but the company wouldn’t allow her to import a product bought in the us for use on canadian wifi. she bought a digital antenna on a whim, figuring maybe they’d get seven stations, all local, which would at least permit them to watch hockey, if it was airing. the channel scan picked up 37 stations, some with call letters she recognized from being a child, others she’d never heard of before that seemed new, specifically designed for digital transmission. she sat on the couch inside the city she grew up in and was twenty-seven years younger, waiting as convex glass warmed the picture, sitting cross-legged on the carpet so she could easily turn the channel knob on the console. she was entranced by the images; instead of strands of static, there were scrambled squares. she channel surfed without a guide past a show called “world’s funniest weather” that featured video of a woman’s wig being blown off her head in a thunderstorm. she listened to the live studio audience hooting and hollering for attractive women clad in dated aerobics wear on “married with children.” she saw a vampiric and ageless cindy crawford hawking cosmetics. several home shopping channels. david cassidy and the partridge family singing in matching polka-dotted, bell-bottomed jumpsuits on a blackened sound stage. chupacabra’s hunters arranging infrared cameras in a forest to capture any flick of movement. some old 1970’s television show with a very young john travolta living in a shitty, bare-bones apartment, though, inexplicably, he had a closet full of brand-new fluffy white towels. there was also matlock’s distinctive squint. she settled on a program called “country restoration,” a british show where ambitious people took on old historic homes and rebuilt them to their former glory. the episode featured a couple with a brick farmhouse from the 1800’s. and inside the home she saw herself in the lolly columns, the scaffolding, the crumbling brick and loosened mortar, and inside the face of every expert handling the painstaking work she saw herself making the sanctum of her soul stable and safe. 220416 what's it to you? who go blather from