Woodpile Man
Found Object 02/15/2010
 

Found Object

One weekend in the fall of 2009, I decided it was time to build the doors for the old garage that the new woodshed was leaning against. The old door that was supposed to go up and down on tracks no longer went up or down. The whole bottom panel finally fell off, and with out it, it was impossible to get the door to roll down the tracks any more. Even if I could roll it down, the first panel would be missing and the whole bottom would be open. It would look crappy and it would let in the rain and snow. So when school started again in September I asked Lorry to ask her ex if he could saw me up some pine for 2 new doors. These doors would be on hinges and swing open and closed instead of rolling up and down. Lorry’s son brought over 12 of the most beautiful 1” by 12” by 10 ft pine boards I have ever seen. They were still warm from the saw slicing them. The boards were solid and pure white, except for large swirling knots that looked like dark amber embedded in the wood. Who am I, I wondered, to use such wood?

I piled the boards with spacers between them so air could flow in on all sides and they could dry and they wouldn’t mildew or rot. I figured they would be pretty dry by the end of next spring. They would be lighter and easier to hang with hinges and there wouldn’t be large gaps between each vertical board.  But after the leaves all fell and the door-less garage looked bleaker and uglier than ever, I started sawing the wood and nailing it together and I made two big doors. It was Saturday, early November. By Sunday I was hanging the doors with hinges I hoped weren’t too small (I couldn’t find bigger ones and I didn’t want to wait for the blacksmith to make bigger ones for me) and putting pull handles and a hasp and staple lock on them.

Now, the heart of this little story is all about the hasp and staple lock. I didn’t know it was called a hasp and staple lock, but in order to write about it I had to name it, so I did what people do now and searched “locks” on Google. Eventually the word “hasp” appeared, and then “staple,” and then, as my friend Joe might say, “There I was.”  As far as I can figure out, the staple is the big metal ring and the hasp is the steel rectangle with a rectangle hole cut out of it that goes over the ring. Once you have the staple sticking out of the hasp hole, you slap a lock on it and no one can open the door. But I didn’t need a lock. There is nothing in the garage that anyone would want to take, and I didn’t want another key to put on my overcrowded key ring. I just needed something to stick in the staple to keep the door shut against the wind. At first I found a strong little stick with some branches sprouting from the top and I put that through the staple and the sprouting branches kept it from falling through. But as the doors dried and they shrunk, the staple was no longer in the middle of the hole in the hasp, but it was right up against the hasp on one side of the hole, and I had to pry the hasp apart from the staple with the little piece of wood I used to prevent the hasp from opening, (which it wouldn’t do any more). So I decided two things yesterday: move the steel pad with the staple on it closer to the door that the hasp is screwed into, and get a new thing to put in the staple so the hasp can’t swing open.

I looked around. What you need is usually not more than a few feet from where you are. Sometimes. I met the woman I would eventually marry in the apartment next door to me, in Los Angels, 28 years ago, but the college I went to (at first) was 5,000 miles away from my New England home. So I’m looking around, and about four inches from the garage door, on the ground, is this iron thing I had found in the dirt about 20 years ago when I was planting a tree or making a garden. I really liked it but I never knew what to do with it. So it lay near the garage, waiting to be used or recycled. It might have been part of an old, old tractor, or it might have even been from some pre-combustion engine farm tool that a blacksmith had made on an anvil. Whatever it was, I didn’t know how to use it and I didn’t want to get rid of it. Its day will come, I figured, back when I dug it up.

I smiled now because this was its day. Now that I had moved the staple, and the hasp went back and forth over it easily, this iron thing would slip in the ring of the staple and keep the door closed. There was a perfect iron half circle at the top that would keep the thing from falling through the staple. When I’d want to open the door, I’d just lift the iron thing, pull the hasp back on its hinge, and pull on the handle.

February is half over so it’s pretty much a down hill slide from now to spring. That means it won’t be too long before we can let the fire go out until next fall. I think the wood in the new shed that leans against the garage will last until spring. I was hoping a full shed would last all winter long. This is the first winter I’m using the new shed, and it looks like we’ll be fine. I just ordered a truck load of tree length logs from the man up the road who clears land for a living. He says there will be from 8 to ten cords of wood on the truck. That will more than re-fill the new woodshed. When you buy log length wood, it’s $600.00 a load. When you buy wood cut and split, it’s about $200.00 a cord. If I end up getting 8 cords in the truck-load he’s going to bring me, I will save $1000.00. Plus I won’t need a gym membership because I’ll be cutting and splitting that wood all summer long. Sweat in the summer for heat in the winter.
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