SPRING LETTER FROM HOME
for Sam
Sweetheart and I are both down with very bad colds, or maybe it's the flu? It’s been years since we’ve experienced this sort of wrangle, and after a tough winter. Not fair! Have to laugh.
I can hear the goldfinch calling out in the rain as I type. Most of the snow is gone except for the snow that always lasts until May 1st at the back door. A big pile there. I checked yesterday.
I tore down the old duck shed/tool shed I built 35 years ago of salvaged lumber — pine boards and even the oak floor joists I yanked out of this main house when I renovated in 1977. The joists were heavy gang plank mothers, worked perfectly in the old shed for the roof. Lasted. This time around I slid them out and bucked them up for firewood and now they heat the very room where I once pulled them from. You can go home again.
I salvaged 3/4 of the old lumber and have now built a tool room extension to the studio building. It sort of looks like Thoreau’s hut with his woodshed addition. It will take the mowers (which you don’t like) and all other tools for landscape work. I got it framed up, raftered, purlined, and sheathed over the weekend. Just to put on the white cedar wall shingles and evergreen steel roof. Let all future snowfalls slide off.
I’ll also put a blue steel roof on the stone hut in May. It will turn 30, with Carson.
© Bob Arnold
Spring 2015
