Over many years when working in the woods I cut out ironwood chunks and brought one or two home to bark peel, dry out and eventually paint to install on the wall as a clothes hook. We used them all the while Carson was growing up. Sometimes he carried one home for me as we came back from work. Eventually they all got moved for something new and Sweetheart took the hooks as a good sport thinking she would use them in her weaving room. Years ago.
This morning in a general cleaning-out-the-corner ceremony, I noticed the hooks all in my tool room, no word said. Everything said. I figured I'd take a photo of the gang before I start distributing them back outdoors where they always belonged. They got painted to 'go with the room'. Now I'll see how they do in the great paint-never-lasts outdoors. A place for a cap, a work rag, an old shirt, a canteen strap. They'll find their place.
Once upon a time a friend and I built a footbridge, heavy enough to take a tribe all at once. We cut out of the neighboring woods and used ironwood as stringers. But unpeeled. We had a boss who thought he knew better than we did, and of course the unpeeled stringers rotted.
How I was later hired to replace those rotted stringers, with a ladder, in a river, is another story.
photo, ironwood © bob arnold
