Nails

We joke around here about the building practices of the folks who built our places.    Sometimes they used 1 nail where they should have used 3.   Sometimes they used 7 where they should have used 1.   You never know until you get inside. 

I noticed this row of nails where they had pulled the wood off the side of the old shed I've been telling you about.   One nail per board across the tops and another across the bottoms.   It was frugal and it held for decades.  

Sheet Metal

All of the old out buildings [and some of the old houses] had this roofing. They had taken half the roof off and stacked it up neatly to cart away or for re-use.  I love the textures. 

Corner Shelf

A corner of the shed I've been telling you about.   It's very common to see these clever shelves.   You never know what you're going to find on them. 

Notice the fishing pole tucked back there.

Chain

It's common to find old chains hanging on the walls of barns and sheds out here.   This one is being salvaged from an old shed that's being torn down down the way.    They're big chains.  Fat chains.  Heavy chains.    We use them to tow things, to wrap around stumps and trees to pull them loose, to attach to come-alongs.

The last time we used one was last summer, with a come-along [wiki], to right an SUV that had been tipped over into a big ditch [driven by an inexperienced teen driver going too fast down our hill on loose gravel].   Eric hooked it all up around a big tree across the road from the wreck and after reminding the driver and his friend to keep entirely away from it and that they did not need to help push it upright, righted the thing by himself.    

Chains and come-alongs are fabulous.    [Here's a link to a bunch of come-alongs if you want to check some out].

Tires

From the old shed I told you about yesterday.   They were in a pile.  I didn't count them, but there were more than enough for a couple of vehicles.

Old Shed

Things change. 

Things age and start to fall down.   There's an old machine shed down the way from us that has been aging - rather ungracefully lately - for a long time.   The neighbor built it from wood he salvaged from the old farmhouse that was on the property when he moved there.  He lived in a mobile home on the place and tore down the old house and built a machine shed.  Over the years it filled up with stuff.

They're tearing it down now and over the next few days, I'll show you some of the treasures that collected there over the years.   I have mixed feelings about these old places.   The piles of stuff alternately result in raised eyebrows, rolled eyes and grins of appreciation.

Happy New Year!

I hope you're not too hung over after last night's festivities.    We really partied here!   There was music and sushi and eggnog and fizzy water and we finally dropped into bed around 11pm.  Or maybe it was 11:30.   It was really really late.

Yeah.  We're real partiers.  It'll take us a couple of days to recover. 

I've been thinking a lot about sonnets lately.   Partly because of the Christmas sonnet I wrote you last year and partly because I'm teaching a homeschool co-op class on poetry.   I've mentioned before that I am no poet.  In fact, I didn't even get poetry at all until after I had my first baby.   Then, magically, one morning I looked into her beautiful face and she smiled at me.   And wha-BAM.   I understood poetry.

That is a true story.

It may have had something to do with hormones.

Anyway. I have discovered that I really like writing sonnets.   Who knew??   The trick for me is getting the first line.   Once I get the first line, I can wrestle with the rest and end up with something interesting, which is all I'm after.

So I wrote you a New Year's Day Sonnet in celebration of the junk so often seen surrounding our rural homes.   I hope you enjoy it.  The poem, not the junk.  Though you're welcome to enjoy the junk, too, if you like.






Rurification Sonnet #2     Rural Yards

Our yards are full of things we don’t need yet
but might, some time, need right here close at hand,
like last year’s papers (good for mulching). Let
nobody touch them there! Yes, I have planned
a dozen ways to use the mower that
expired in ’10 just past the giant yew,
and other ways to use the one the cat
likes sleeping on. You see?! We need the two!
The piles of wood, junked cars and trucks -- the goats
and chickens live quite happy in the mess
of wires and bales and windows from the boats
My cousins got the year the cider press
became ‘antique’ instead of just plain old.
All fine just where they’re at, till used or sold.

Glass Jugs

A few miles away from us was one of those lovely old barns that had been around forever.  Last year, that poor old barn came down in the heavy snow that took out a few other barns out here.   The owners hauled off the debris, little by little, section by section.   They cleaned up all the wood and a lot of the stuff that had been inside.   They left this small collection of old glass jugs sitting on some sort of old chest.   You can see where some have been on the ground and gotten some of that old black barn mud in them. 

After who knows how many decades hidden away in the dark of the barn, they sit out in the open now and catch the sun.   They glow.  

I love them. 

Eric said that they're probably left over from the manufacturing of some homemade product - probably around the 1920s and 30s - that made people glow, too.     

I wouldn't be surprised. 

House with a Balcony

This house has a lot of character.    I'll bet it can tell a reeeally good story. 

Or twenty.

It's the little balcony on the front that gets me.

Chez Rural

I've been working on my French.

It's not pretty. Neither is this junky corner of the property.

I've been working on my French since graduate school, when one day I was trying to say 'What a pity!' [Quel dommage!] and it came out 'Quel fromage!' - [What cheese!   Foreshadowing, anyone?]

I swear these junky corners tableaux just spontaneously appear overnight  [du jour de lendemain] around our place.   Here you see some snow shovels, a bunch of buckets in various stages of holiness...uh...holeyness? [avec des trous], an old tarp, the livestock tank we use for raising tiny birds then later for floating medium sized ducks, one of the wheelbarrows, an old galvanized tub that the hose is sometimes curled up neatly in, various old hoses, a pile of 'pretty' rocks and parts of an old swingset [balancoire].

Oh.  And weeds.  Les mauvaises herbes.  The bad herbs.  They totally give the whole tableau a certain je ne sais pas quoi [Thank you, Karen, for the right spelling.]

Fin.   [The end.]

Mystery Cast Iron

The kids pulled this out of the creek.  

It's cast iron, not as rusty as I'd expect for being in the creek for very long.  

It's kind of pretty.   I wonder what on earth could have broken something that big.  

We have no idea what it is.    Feel free to guess in the comments.  

Old Tank

It used to be common to see tanks like these out here in people's basements.   They were probably pretty common in towns, too.     I'll let you guess in the comments what they were for.  A lot of you probably recognized it right away.  

We had one like this in our basement when we moved in and when it came time to move it out [a decade ago now] we had to haul it up some steep and narrow stairs into a tiny hallway and then out the door.    I believe it took a very large piece of cardboard and a comealong attached to the frame of the basement door with both of us pulling and pushing.  I'm pretty sure there was some swearing, too.   No one was crushed in the attempt, but it's a day we'll never forget.  

Our old tank is out in our barn, buried under some lumber, I think.   We're still trying to figure out how to clean it out so we can take it to the scrap metal place.  

Coal Scuttle

This is a coal scuttle.  They're also called coal hods.    I love the shape.   They were used to hold a supply of coal upstairs near the fire so it would be easy to add coal to the fire without going down to the basement [or wherever your coal pile is] to get some every time you needed to feed your fire. 

They're shaped so it's easy to pour the coal into the fire.   They come in a bunch of styles. 

Here's a bit more information from Wiki.

Since we live in coal country, once in a while we see a pile of coal outside a structure all winter.  Yoho's used to have one.   They used something like this scuttle to move coal indoors for the fire every day.   Now that Yoho is getting restored, I'm thinking they won't have the coal pile outside anymore.   And probably not the coal stove inside.   They're supposed to open again in a month or so.  I'll keep you posted.