Catherine Combs (CC) and Anne Garde (AG)
AG: We’re house painters. 20 years of working together.
CC: We’re like the Mutt & Jeff of the painting world. I’m a big girl and you’re just a little slip of a thing. When we have to get up and paint something high up in the stairwell I put one leg of the ladder on the stairs and I put the other one on my knee and I say, “It’s ok, Anne. You can trust me. Come on, climb up there. They laugh. And she always climbs up there.
AG: But I usually am going, “Why did I let you talk me into this”. They laugh. You know sometimes on the job you actually call me The Queen of the Inconsequential because I’m always there looking at the little part that’s underneath the cabinet and how come we can’t we get a straight line there, you know?
CC: And I prefer to get a little piece of tape and put it down there that says “What are you looking down here for anyway?”
AG: Yeah. We love to play the name that tune game.
CC: That’s right.
AG: That’s one thing that we can do on the job while we’re working. OK Catherine. Name this tune: she hums.
CC:…venus in bluejeans.
AG: Alright.
CC: I can name that in three notes.
AG: We have all kinds of ways of making a day at work be fun.
CC: We share an eccentricity and a certain verve for life. And we respect those things in each other. You are also one of the people with the most verve and love of life that i’ve ever met. I mean you love life so much that you can hardly …
AG: Yeaow…
CC:… bring yourself to go to sleep at night because you’ll miss living some of it.
AG: Yeah. Yeah sometimes I just go out on my little porch and I look out and theres the trees and the sky and beautiful mountains and I think, “I’m alive”. And it, you know, this little joy comes. You know. And then it just goes and you go to work and you do your thing but you just have to remember that, its like, hey, you could be dead.
CC: Laugh.
AG: You could not be here. You know not being around for this beautiful world.
CC: Yeah.
