What a lot of people didn’t know about Josh was that he liked to work with his hands. When he wasn’t in class, or preparing or grading, he could often be found at a little place he owned just outside of the city, where all of his carpentry equipment was set up. During the week, he often stayed at the school, mostly because the drive to and from the French Quarter was too long and too crowded for him to make on a regular basis, but during the weekends and during the summer, he stayed out here, set back into a wooded area, somewhere he could be at peace. It was a great place, and one that he looked forward to taking off to every weekend. This weekend, he had a project that he was embarking on: clearing away a tree for one of his good friends. It had fallen on his property, and since John didn’t own a chainsaw and had no use for the wood, Josh had been his first call. So now, even though his friend was officially out of the state for the weekend, he was driving out to his friend’s land, belting out 80s rock, and already trying to think how he would get the woods back to his truck, since the fallen tree was set back in the forest.

The drive wasn’t too long, in truth the walk from the small access road that he had parked on to the site of the fallen tree had taken longer. Still, by the time he finally got out there, he had worked up a mild sweat, though that didn’t stop his sunny mood or the humming of Bowie’s Ashes to Ashes under his breath as he went. Eventually, he got to the site of the fallen tree, and he looked it over with a small frown. It wasn’t quite what he was expecting, and he knew that he wouldn’t be able to lug it back to his truck by himself. With his friend being gone for the weekend that meant that at best he would be able to cut it down, and would have to rope one of his friends into helping him bring it back later on.

Josh made friends pretty easily. He was that kind of guy who set himself up at the bar with a beer and instantly made friends with anybody how hung out around him, or who would run into someone on a walk around New Orleans, and by the end of their walk, he would have a phone number and a plan to meet up for coffee later on in the week. It wasn’t that he was actively trying, most people just saw him as incredibly likeable, though he couldn’t say that he saw the appeal. In his mind, he was just… a normal guy, someone to hand around and someone who loved life, but a normal guy all the same. There were plenty of people he felt that he could count on to come help him out with this, and he hoped that they were free, since it was the weekend.

Leaning down, Josh set the chainsaw that he had lugged back here to the side. Before he even started cutting the trunk, he went for the branches and the smaller pieces that had a tendency to not be useful for anything. Those he would leave behind so that they could decay properly and revitalize the land. Taking his small ax in hand, he swung at the smaller pieces, scattering them around the forest floor nearby as evenly as he could. When that was finished, he made his way over to where his things were still sitting, and grabbed a bottle of water. He was dying for some water; even with the customary winter chill in the Louisiana air, he had been working up a sweat, and it still had nothing on the bitter cold that was so inherent in New York. In the forest behind him, a stick snapped as if underfoot, and Josh turned his head to the side. If there was any one thing that he had learned by working out in the woods on the regular basis, most of the time if it was audible, it was human. Still, there was that hint of fear, knowing that he was really likely to end up gored by a deer if one decided it didn’t like the look of him. “Hello?” He called out, feeling stupid that he was potentially calling out to some kind of wildlife that probably couldn’t even answer him back. “Is someone there?”