WALKER ~

I’ve been reading John Ledyard again, our man stopped by Catherine the Great in 1788 when he attempted to walk around the world. He did do a fair portion: touching down on America's western shores before Lewis & Clark, through some of Europe, all of Lapland. Pretty much considered an early day terrorist while in Russia (their fur trade possessiveness, Ledyard’s own aggressive interest in fur and trade).


While in Hanover, when crossing from Vermont into New Hampshire, we noticed the marvelous bridge, quite fancy, is named after Ledyard. Many of the biographies of the man are written by Dartmouth College alumni. The one who arrived in Hanover when the college was nineteen months old, its first half dozen acres roughed out and first built by a minister and his slaves, with a college charter proclaiming "education and instruction of the youth of the Indian tribes" which didn't quite succeed. Fleet-footed Ledyard lasted only one year. He had other things to do — like dropping a shoreline white pine and hollowing it out as a 50 x 3 foot dugout canoe, handwork he learned while recruiting students from the Six Nations Iroquois and paddling down the Connecticut to his family home in Connecticut. His favorite author Ovid as book companion.

Born in Groton, Connecticut in 1751 to the well-to- do, this sea captain's son and dreamer was shunned any inheritance that went to a younger brother, and for his 37 years got by on wit and wisdom and walking. Lots of walking. Some of his associates were the sailor John Paul Jones, Captain James Cook, and Thomas Jefferson, who slipped the adventurer funding and ideas, the latter the former didn't quite have the stomach for. While serving as the American ambassador in Paris, Jefferson hatched this brainstorm journey for Ledyard to explore the American continent — through overland Russia, crossing the Bering Strait and down across America to Virginia. Ledyard said he would do this on-foot. He would prowl across 2/3 of Russia before facing Catherine the Great's authority.


Aboard James Cook's final voyage, where the captain was murdered on a Hawaiian beach, Ledyard became a British marine for four years. He circled the world. Wrote of his adventures. One hundred years before Arthur Rimbaud, John Ledyard traveled into Africa as an explorer for the African Association and would die there at the same age as the poet (37); who never made it back, as was his plan. Ledyard's plan was characteristically bold: he would lead an expedition from the Red Sea to the Atlantic. Not at all well, close to Cairo, Ledyard died in 1789 overdosing on vitriolic acid and was buried in the sand dunes along the Nile. The precise location has never been found.

photo: © bob arnold
dartmouth.edu

EDEN 7 ~

POET IN RESIDENCE


Before I thought to make the little bakery booklet of poems, Sweetheart and I spoke about framing each poem, unsigned, and installing them on the bakery walls.

It would be a bold move.

In the bakery, on all the walls around the fairly large one room built like a barn, with timbered posts and beams, white walls, many splashy windows, are paintings on display by some local artists. Not always that good.

So we thought, for a day only, we would come in before the place opened, using our magic key, and take down for a very short time the paintings everyone was used to, and hang in their place these unsigned framed poems. Small poems, small frames.

The thing to keep in mind is that no one knows us in the bakery, or even the town. This is just our concocted crazy scheme. Do you realize how many great things are drummed up this way? and how many equally bad and ruinous and selfish things are made? Miserable and sweeping oil spills derive from almost the same commanding self-interest, but this would be poetry, kept small scale, and in this case kept imaginary. So let me continue with the dream. . .

The public might protest the act, but it would be a sure thing that they would approach the smaller world, on seeing the paintings and color and big world removed (all stored lovingly in the back room against one another), and come to the framed poems curious as to who had the nerve to do this.

They would stop at one and cry out loud to the others who have gone to all the other poems, “You call this a poem?!” and another would reply after peering into a frame, “I know! Who did this?” and others would only grumble as they dashed frame to frame.

The only ones who were saying nothing — in fact little smiles could be seen from the corners of their mouths as they left one poem and walked slowly to another — were the ones who recognized themselves. Yes, these were poems written about and for people who had come to the bakery for a cookie or a turnover with no idea on that same day someone was watching and remembering. These would be poems absolutely to and for the bakery and its customers. Nothing more. Oh, well, maybe to the surroundings. . .

Even the poet wasn’t quite sure if the poems were any good, but he was happy enough to see for a very short time such a ruckus.

Of course it didn’t take long for that one with Authority — and it is often an individual who doesn’t come even close to the work, never mind bothering to read it or look at it — to take over, and the frames were now being removed by a small squad of volunteers, who got the poem frames all off the walls and momentarily placed on tables.

But then people were seen still curious going to the unguarded tables and lifting a poem to read, maybe for a second or third time.

In the meantime, the Authority figure was seen standing in the middle of the bakery shouting orders to his minions, “Did you look around all the corners, one could be there!” And sure enough there was another small poem in a 5 x 7 frame just waiting. Floating in its stillness...

There were different accounts but one person swears the poems stayed up for at least one hour, and it was at that lovely hour in any bakery in any part of the world, Sunday morning, 7:45 to 8:45, as people were waking up and walking in with the slowly warming sunrise.

One child was heard to say, “I liked the poems. It was different,” then shrugging and biting into a powdered cookie.

When the artists were told what had happened to their works, they made sure they returned personally to see that their paintings were hung properly. It’s not just any old frame on a nail, you know.

from A Possible Eden, Bob Arnold, Longhouse 2010

photo: © Bob Arnold

EARTH ~

VASHTI BUNYAN

The proclaimed godmother of Freak Folk was London born in 1945. A pal of Donovan, she once took off for the northern reaches of Scotland to join a commune, but before that she traveled to New York City and fell under the influence of early Bob Dylan (the Freewheelin' album). The traveling time in the UK was a year and a half on the road, stretching from South London to the Hebrides, in a horse and cart. Joe Boyd produced her first album Just Another Diamond Day, recorded in three evenings at the height of the sixties with some of the finest British folk musicians. Critically received, the album was never known. Having enough of that, VB disappeared into Ireland from the music scene for the next 30 years to raise three children and tend to her animals. A beautiful Earth Mother. In 2000 her first album was rereleased, followed by a second album Lookaftering in 2005. Word has it a fourth album is slowly in the works. I drew the song "Winter Is Blue" from the collection Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind, a 2-CD compilation of singles and demos cut from 1964 to 1967. The title of the collection and first song was penned by Keith Richards and Mick Jagger and recorded by VB in 1965.

EDEN 6 ~

LITTLE ONES


I went out before the rain and scythed the roadway. Only me out there, though Kokomo, our kitten, would certainly follow me anywhere. Yesterday I was scything and a neighbor was walking by, she limps and her elder dog wheezes. I can hear them coming from fifty feet off with my back turned on an old dirt road. She knows the pooch is going to die any time now, but I mentioned how she still wags her tail. What a heart an animal has. I’ve tried to learn my lessons from birds and animals and the great Mother more than other humans, but occasionally a human being becomes a spectacular moment. So as I am saying adieu to the neighbor and her dog heading up river for the mailbox, I turn and look down behind the stonewall and there’s my buddy Kokomo who has made his silent stay all the way to the road and by my boots where I stand...peering out with those glorious eyes. Beaming. It was his first look at a dog. I left myself and thought more about him. I know he is everything to me that I give to my one grown son. It can’t be helped.

from A Possible Eden, Bob Arnold, Longhouse 2010

photo: © Bob Arnold

EDEN 5 ~

TALKING


We have had a spring like we haven’t seen in years and years, extending since early March and right up until today in mid-May. Already we have had all four seasons over this spring: snow fell, summer days fancy all in a row, the blue sky spun spring days, and a chill of autumn passed by more than a few times. In dips and doodles we have managed to get way ahead of ourselves during spring: new benches built for the porches, we painted the house, and we fetched in all next winter’s firewood. We feel pretty fat and saucy with accomplishments. Plus all the new booklets we’ve designed and handmade. Something will go haywire to balance out all the good deeds done. Our twenty-one year old pickup truck may be the first: it needs lots of work and with an engine still producing oil that looks like maple syrup, we fight to keep the frame and body intact with such a fine engine. We’ll hate to lose the old friend truck. Ever talk to your truck, or beloved car, chain saw, woodstove, splitting maul, even trees? I do. I’ve spoken to trees before I’ve cut them down; it was the least I could do.

from A Possible Eden, Bob Arnold, Longhouse 2010

photo: © Bob Arnold

EDEN 4 ~

A GOOD IDEA


What Sweetheart has told me about Florida weather, when she lived there as a young woman for a short time, was rain or thunderstorms would come out from the day, each day, like clockwork, at 4PM. Which reminds me how my mother used to visit her Irish parents in their basement apartment and I was often with her, right at this hour, and they would all sit and visit around the kitchen table with a pot of tea. Quite British for these devoted northern Irish Protestants. I was a little boy and everything looked large and wholesome in these few small rooms.

The month of May has been enriched and damaging. Killer frost has done much of the damage. Apple blossoms, flowers, whole crops. They say the apple crop may have been almost completely ruined. I don’t want to imagine Vermont without apples. Even the hardy oaks, up and down the river valley, burnt-leaf from the frost. Somehow Sweetheart planted lettuce and encouraged it to grow during this rough cold so we have it in our salads each day. Her green thumb. Plus she has a method of planting right in composted leaves and debris, and it all looks ragged and unpretty when gazing over such gardens. It looks like a brilliant unkempt. In that debris little plants crowd together their strength to grow, sheltered from the storm.

from A Possible Eden, Bob Arnold, Longhouse 2010

photo: © Bob Arnold

EDEN 3 ~

BY AFTERNOON. . .


A wayfarer stopped by yesterday as I was writing out a Russian folk song on the roadside chalkboard. I heard a scooter approach and then the engine die. Behind me was a small fellow who never took his padded helmet off. Printed “Bell” on the front. Stayed on. Like he was holding his brains together, or more likely so he could remain comfortable with himself. Sweetheart came out to be with me so the man met us both. As people drove by they waved to us. One fellow, in a dusty and boxy and broken in like a leather saddle Volvo came slinking by, and the bearded young driver had a look and a smile and a conniving, just like Lucifer, and he shouted out of his window pleasantly, “I love the chalkboard!” I’ve never seen him before. Life is grand. This new stranger is seventy-six years old, he told us. From the road the man read aloud the folk song on the chalkboard. So here was involvement! Here was a singer! The longer he stayed with us, and us with him (over an hour), the more he resembled an old Unitarian minister friend I used to know and worked for. I did a lot of carpentry on the minister’s summer home. This stranger visiting had busted teeth, strange to see in someone so well-dressed and with the neat little scooter he parked, and when he smiled (not at all shy to do so) he now really resembled the dead minister friend. When he started slowly but surely to preach the gospel, clever not to overwhelm (maybe where he got the busted teeth?), he convinced Sweetheart and me that he was a return of someone long gone.

Monday was a day between town and country where we were meeting many of the dead. The day before, I had written a sequence of poems on the road in New Hampshire. Yesterday I scribbled swiftly five new poems while waiting for a door to open. A long wait. Well over an hour. I met up with all sorts of street characters, which I liked. The poems came swiftly. Visitations. The wayfarer, before he left, confided to us that he has trouble meeting people and staying friends. “I think it’s because of my excitement for life!” he said, stepping into the sunshine. And yes I could see a youthful squeeze to his two hands as he made fists adoring his own celebration. He shook those fists. I knew a religious sermon was coming next, but the warm spring sunshine had us all at that moment, bigger than any god.

from A Possible Eden, Bob Arnold, Longhouse 2010

photo: © Bob Arnold

EDEN 2 ~

ANOTHER OLD WOMAN


There is another old woman who I don’t see as regularly as the other one wishing for new underwear, but when I do see her she has the face of many women I have known in the past. All good women. All women who have suffered, or raised children and suffered some, or couldn’t have children, and suffered with that. Suffering is part of loving. I’ve climbed the parking garage stairway twice for exercise and am back in my waiting line, except no one is waiting yet with me. I am early. An early bird. I see what may be this old woman coming down the stairs as she rounds the turnstile corners, and I see more and more of her...the very slow descent, the all black clothing, shirtsleeves and shorts, ill-fitting a very worn out body...coming closer. Now she is at ground level and approaching, and I’m not quite looking up from the book I read (Ristovic, of all people!) and when I do, I see a face, large and sad and filled with every homily that ever existed. The true face. Unvarnished, in no need of etiquette or pro forma, it’s looking to me as squarely and fairly as a dog that loves, but in this case it is all of life’s affections with how she says, “Hello.”

from A Possible Eden, Bob Arnold, Longhouse 2010

photo: © Bob Arnold

EDEN 1 ~

AFTER NOSFERATU. . .



There is the old woman who usually talks to us and has decided to take a seat on the newly painted park bench. I watched the worker last week at this same time and temperature paint this bench. It was 40 degrees, and he was carrying on anyway. On the paint can it would suggest 55 degrees to be the proper temperature to begin painting.

A lot of the world was made by not reading.

Thirty feet away I called out to the woman taking her seat, “No conversation today. . .?” She looked over, waved and then I saw the smile. She rose and came over. I couldn’t move. I was stuck in a waiting line where one couldn’t afford to lose their place.

A lot of the world was made this way, too.

When the woman came over, and she always begins her conversation twenty feet off so all the world around her is immediately involved, she said she was planning to catch the local bus to go over to “Wally World” (Wal-Mart), because she had to buy some underwear. She told the world she had to buy some underwear. The world heard it, I could see, but I also could see they made sure they didn’t get involved.

A lot of the world was also made this way.

We didn’t have to ask why she couldn’t find underwear in town, because we already knew since we can’t find or afford to buy the underwear when we find it in town, and she was loudly telling us, and all the world this anyway. Underwear costs $16 per pair now in small town. This is how Wal-Mart moved in. And stayed. And the world spins on.

from A Possible Eden, Bob Arnold,
Longhouse 2010

photo © bob arnold

EARTH ~

the other night. . .




photo © bob arnold

EARTH ~ WERNER & WALDO ~

KITCHEN BOOK ~

We had a good friend of the family come by the other night for a late supper and an overnight before he shoved off the next morning for the Catskills, a lovely three hour morning ride. The last time he was here we were building the scaffold for the roof job. He never saw the full scale job and it was too dark when he arrived to see the new roof, but he did say it all sounded "heroic", either when he read the Birdhouse report or maybe in one of my personal letters to him. "Heroic" could mean it indeed was, or little ol' me made my reports this way. I'm ready to take responsibility for both. If we all have anything left of ourselves, and between and with each other, let it be a few inches of the heroic. It need not be selfish or selfless. It can be fully a gift.

I already mentioned in a previous Birdhouse James and Kay Salter's excellent book Life Is Meals (Knopf) of food chat, menus and all good things eating. Never at McDonalds, mind you, or slumming at any dairy bars that I can recall. The Salters are shimmering in Paris, tending fine NY restaurants, abiding their own cuisine at home in Aspen, and a lot of it surrounded by names like Alice Waters, A.J. Liebling, Craig Claiborne. More heroics. A terrific day book reminiscing on particular food stuffs, vegetables, exquisite meals, personalities, birthdays. The book is all divided into chapters by the month, so I took six days and read two months at a time, all 400 pages of the meaty book aloud to Sweetheart in our Vermont kitchen, between 5&6 o'clock each day, twilight coming, while she prepared our supper. Including the one last night for our guest, except he wasn't here yet so I spoke the book while the chicken cooked, a pot of rice, acorn squash, and I had already fluffed up a salad.

Sweetheart loves to cook and bake. She has since a little girl and was lucky to have a mother who taught her techniques and a certain flair. With me she cooked 30 years on only a wood fired cookstove, and then we added a gas cooking range and on the coldest days of the year we will have both stoves fired up and cooking away. A pie in one (apple or pumpkin), two pans on the flat iron heat, and something roasting in the gas oven. There's a second main woodstove and that's always warming a silver kettle. And keeping our toes warm.

When I would come upon a sumptuous part of the Salter book, say with a recipe, Sweetheart would ask to have it read aloud. Pretty please. Cooks and their recipes are like poets and their best first lines — savor and hold. It's a double treat with this book because the Salters work their prose as poetry. There's everything to learn.

salter photo: narrativemagazine.com
sweetheart: photo © bob arnold

EARTH ~

Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot defend themselves or run away. And few destroyers of trees ever plant any; nor can planting avail much toward restoring our grand aboriginal giants. It took more than three thousand years to make some of the oldest of the Sequoias, trees that are still standing in perfect strength and beauty, waving and singing in the mighty forests of the Sierra. Through all the eventful centuries since Christ's time, and long before that, God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand storms; but he cannot save them from sawmills and fools; this is left to the American people. The news from Washington is encouraging. On March third [1905?] the House passed a bill providing for the Government acquisition of the Calaveras giants. The danger these Sequoias have been in will do good far beyond the boundaries of the Calaveras Grove, in saving other groves and forests, and quickening interest in forest affairs in general. While the iron of public sentiment is hot let us strike hard. In particular, a reservation or national park of the only other species of Sequoia, the sempervirens, or redwood, hardly less wonderful than the gigantea, should be quickly secured. It will have to be acquired by gift or purchase, for the Government has sold every section of the entire redwood belt from the Oregon boundary to below Santa Cruz.

from "Save the Redwoods"
Sierra Club Bulletin, January 1920

John Muir: Nature Writings
The Library of America

FATHER FOX ~

Ding, Dong,

Sing me a song,

That way the

Work day is

Not so long.




This poem is by Clyde Watson. It's one I like to remember when at my work and holding tools — whether high on a roof, or scrambling in the dark dirty sections of a crawl space, under floor boards, like I was just the other day — somebody shooting through a stone foundation I had busted into for an iron pipe gas line. This little poem/song can brighten the darkest spot. Try it.

Clyde Watson is a woman with a man's name. Her parents thought it was pretty. She has a sister Wendy who has illustrated some of her books. Father Fox's Pennyrhymes appeared when both were very young. Clyde Watson grew up in an old farmhouse in southern Vermont with animals about and seven brothers and sisters which has been an enduring inspiration for her published work. Her father, who was one of the ones that liked a pretty name, is the graphic artist Aldren Watson.

a tiny clyde watson

MICHELANGELO ~

Two sonnets in praise of Dante (1265-1321), composed by M. 1545-46, of which the artist knew the poet's work intimately. In their separate times, from Florence, both were forced into exile.

248


---He came down from heaven, and once he had seen

the just hell and the merciful one,he went

back up, with his body alive, to contemplate God,

in order to give us the true light of it all.

---For such a shining star, who with his rays

undeservedly brightened the nest where I was born,

the whole wicked world would not be enough reward;

only you, who created him, could ever be that.

---I speak of Dante, for his deeds were poorly

appreciated by that ungrateful people

who fail to welcome only righteous men.

---If only I were he! To be born to such good fortune

to have his harsh exile along with his virtue,

I would give up the happiest state in the world.

250


---All that should be said of him cannot be said,

for his splendor flamed too brightly for our eyes;

it's easier to blame the people who hurt him

than for all our greatest to rise to his last virtue.

---This man descended to the just deserts of error

for our benefit, and then ascended to God;

and the gates that heaven did not block for him

his homeland shut to his righteous desire.

---I call her ungrateful, and nurse of her fortune

to her own detriment, which is a clear sign

that she lavishes the most woes on the most perfect.

---Among a thousand proofs this one suffices:

no exile was ever as undeserved as his,

and no man equal or greater was ever born.






Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564)

translated by James M. Saslow
The Poetry of Michelangelo (Yale)

EARTH ~

THINK BACK, PILGRIM (X)

Flourishing minds were at work during the filming of Contempt / Le Mepris (1963) — the French-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard, his cameraman Raoul Coutard, actors Michel Piccoli, Brigitte Bardot, Jack Palance, and an angel on my shoulder visitation by German director Fritz Lang, who plays a director in a film about a film about theater about an odyssey. It is probably Godard's most commercially successful film, loosely based on a novel by Alberto Moravia, with black magic ingredients injected by Godard. In this sequence shown we are located around Casa Malaparte — the home creation on the island of Capri by the Italian author Curzio Malaparte. He fired his architect and built this rock nest on rock with the stonemason Adolfo Amitrano. It's situated 32 meters above the sea overlooking the Gulf of Salerno. Its wholeness with nature reminded the author of his youth in Tuscany. Things got done by Malaparte, even during a world war (2) and maybe because of it. If lung cancer hadn't cut him short just shy of age 60, one of his dreams was to bicycle across America.

Curzio Malaparte with Zita

Photo courtesy Casa Malaparte archive

ALL MIGHTY ~

film: Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary (2002) a documentary
by Andre Heller & Othmar Schmiderer

EARTH ~







DA TAGTE ES


redeem the surrogate goodbyes

the sheet astream in your hand

who have no more for the land

and the glass unmisted above your eyes



Samuel Beckett
Collected Poems in English & French
(Grove Press)

DAYDREAM ~

Eric Hoffer

The man who wrote well of fanaticism and mass movements (where we are returning) in any of his ten books (see The True Believer and The Ordeal of Change) was Bronx born in 1902 and was gone in 1983, but not without leaving his mark. Mostso in the city of San Francisco, around the docks of The Embarcadero, where he worked and lived as a longshoreman until his retirement at the age of 65. This was an era when someone still loved to work. The longshoreman philosopher is what they called him, best served in his classic Working and Thinking on the Waterfront, a personal favorite of mine — less on the preaching and extolling and more on the building of each day, mind, body and spirit.


Hoffer had a short and cruel childhood — his mother accidentally fell on a stairway with 5 year old Hoffer in her arms — this fall would take her life. Hoffer went blind two years later. At 5 he was already reading both English and German. His cabinetmaker father died shortly after the boy of fifteen's sight miraculously returned, no one knows quite how, but he began reading voraciously and never stopped. He was said to have a library card in every town in southern California where he worked his early years as a migrant worker. A favorite author was Montaigne.


Incorrectly labeled a conservative, Hoffer was but one more hardworking dreamer and doer, living simply and alone in his San Francisco apartment near the docks. Never wealthy or abusive with power, as many who had admired and awarded him (Reagan), he was a poet of America's underclass, which he described as "lumpy with talent."

"Hear, Hear!" and hello Eric Hoffer.

Columbia Records famed producer John Hammond caught the young Dylan in one word, it was the very word that zeroed in the troubadour — quite different than all the others with a guitar — "sincerity". When Hoffer was alive and at work, and Dylan was rising fast, no one in their right mind would align the two...yet there is the same sincerity in the work of both. In this song, unlike any Dylan would ever write or perform, is the open heart and the open road — Hoffer born in New York City had to get westward; Dylan off the northern plains had to get to New York. Prospects, hurdles and dreams are with them both. Far beyond politics. Lucky stars.







eric hoffer photo from "working and thinking on the waterfront" (Harper & Row)
back road chalkie photo: bob arnold

EARTH ~

Maybe you'll recall from a few weeks back when we were finishing up the new steel roof, a big box of tiles arrived from Mexico. We spent one late breakfast breaking into the nest and marveled over how well all the tiles were wrapped. Somewhere in the world someone is still taking the care with their work. And we tried to complement that on this end by tiling part of the chimney up on the ridgetop, and then on Columbus Day, when bicyclists were sailing by and the maples were turning their best colors, I coated our front door frame, all four sides, with the tiles.
Someday when someone (maybe me) has to get down into the long strap hinges, there will be something to think about. It's good to think. Especially with a tool in your hands.



We were hoping the trapezoid roof shaped job would be the clincher on the spring ~ summer season, where we were away painting a house for someone and taking care of general carpentry repairs, then back home with all sorts of big and small repairs. Roof done, head into some tiling, work up some stonewall, cut plenty of firewood...then the power vent on the old oil furnace busted down. It doesn't work so good without the power vent, although for a week or so I ran the range with one wily worker who had me almost convinced we could run the furnace with a stovepipe for how little we burn per year (75 gallons)...this is a firewood house...and then I pressed him about carbon monoxide poisoning and the draft for the flue and all of a sudden that worker was long gone. Left us in a lurch. I swore the next time a power vent crapped out we'd end our oil run and move to gas. I put the furnace in 20 years ago with a friend and it all still worked fine. A Williamson. Can't find the parts any longer for the beast...so one day I took a few socket-wrenches down into the cellar with me and kneeling in dry crushed rock, dismantled the furnace. The size being maybe the size of what I always imagine one of Wilhelm Reich's orgone boxes to be. Quite an image.





I removed the metal side walls, then dug deeper down into the empty chamber of motor, pump, blower etc., and finally the belly of the beast: the heat exchanger. The heaviest part of the furnace, the worker, the nucleus, the heat maker. Still solid, no cracks, it would make someone a perfect
piece of the furniture if their old furnace was in need. Sweetheart and I lugged everything out of the cellar, then rolled the heat exchanger up planks and lifted it out of the bulkhead, across the porch and then a long roll into the garden where I stood it up in what will be a deep bed of daylily flowers by next June. I removed the small steel roof I built over the old power vent location and topped the heat exchanger off with its cap. In the rain but out of the rain. All the parts are on Craigslist, plus the heat exchanger, and I'll wait awhile before I take it off and keep the parts as decoration, or in the old parts foundry I have where someone may come by one day asking if we 'have a such 'n' such.'



Right now we call the heat exchanger with power vent roof "R2-D2".



I told a friend about our "R2-D2" and he wrote back from Illinois saying, "I always wondered what he'd do after he retired."



Quite an image.






photos © bob arnold






Don't be afraid of being called 'unmodern'. Changes in the old methods of construction are only allowed if they can claim to bring improvement; otherwise stick with the old ways. Because the truth, even if hundreds of years old, has more inner connection than the falsehood that walks beside us.

Adolf Loos, 1913