Recycadelic

The plum-colored Buick Riviera was parked behind the garage when I got home from church, but I didn't know it was Hallie until I walked in the back door and found her in the kitchen with Gven tearing into the ceiling. Voluptuous is not too strong a word. Big blue eyes, big smile, big blond hair, low-cut tank top, knows how to hang drywall, you get the picture. They're in a book group together with eight other suburban women who like to read fiction, drink wine, and talk. Now they're talking spackle and wiring and vents in their own female carpentry language, so I say hello, sounds good, and go outside to work on my own project, the fence of many colors.

Where I left off the day before, the posts and cross-members were in place all the way down the south side, where the improvisational builder (homo faber ignoramus) had determined the front yard ends and the back yard begins, therefore the fence turns a corner toward the side of the house. Two more posts for a gate, one right next to the house, and we're there, enclosed and complete, for now. All the salvaged or scavenged materials are ready to be put in place and become a fence made from scratch. Not a professional job, by any standard, not very straight, somewhat irregular and probably impermanent, but a serviceable fence around our humble yard. And you can't beat the price.

Did I mention that a miracle occurred on Friday? I saw a pile of lumber behind a storage barn next to the bike trail, so I went up there Friday morning. An older man happened to drive up in his little convertible just as I was walking in. I asked him if the barn was his (yes), did he know about the pile of lumber beside it (yes), and did he have any use for it (no, take all you want). So I helped myself to a bunch of cosmetically flawed but plenty strong fence posts and took them to their new home. There were also a couple of good, long 2x4s in the scrap pile, which would also come in handy.

Meanwhile back at the shack, I'm removing nails from old boards (see previous post, BARGAIN OUTLET), inspecting them for color, grain, texture, wear and tear, sorting them into groups that might look better than random combinations. I don't want to take all day deciding which goes next to which, and I'm open to any happy accidents that turn up. Even as I handle every board and group them roughly by color, it's semi-random which stack I start with. The salvaged boards have few common traits but many inconsistencies and flaws. Which is really okay, because so do the scavenged posts and cross-pieces, and for that matter so do the flower beds, garage, and house this fence will tie together.

I had a dream the other night where I'm working on putting together a kind of puzzle made of nearly identical arrow-shaped pieces that have to line up in a particular way so that their differences are minimized to the point where the eye doesn't see any larger or smaller, heavier or lighter, individual and irregular pieces, only the continuity of the line. It was challenging in the dream to see their differences in such a way as to arrange them to appear undifferentiated.

What made sorting boards tricky was the fact that they changed color each time I moved them. (Disclaimer: no drugs were taken during this experiment; I'd had two cups of coffee, some bread and butter, some water, that's it.) In the filtered light of a central Swing State mid-July afternoon, moving a board from one stack to another could change it from a blotchy light brown to a vivid grainy green, or from a pale solid beige to a vibrant reddish hue. Of course, we all know that the color of any object is a function of the way light hits it in a particular place and time, and the eye picks up that bit of information. Then you go from sun to shadow, turn it sideways, half an hour passes, the light changes and so does the color of the board. There is much I can't control in the assembly of my preciousssss fencccccce.

Clearly I'm getting into the process of handling each 4x4, 2x4, and 1x5 piece of wood thrown together by chance so that I can make something out of (almost) nothing. Maybe the heat is getting to me, even in the shade of the stately white pine trees (pinus strobus), as I toil with hammer and level. Board by board, the fence is taking shape from east to west. I use up the current stack of boards and take a break, only to see that Hallie and Gwen are cutting up a long 2x4 to use 3-foot pieces to frame in, and drywall over, the hole in the kitchen ceiling. That was going to be part of the fence, or so I thought. Note the smoke coming out of my ears as Hallie flashes her big smile and asks if it's okay. "It's done," I reply. Note how attached I had become to the free lumber acquired through divine intervention.

Long story short, I went back to my project reminded of the relative unimportance of what I'm totally absorbed in at the moment. Getting back to work on the nitty-gritty details, digging another hole for the gate post, leveling this stick horizontally and that stick vertically, I'm content to mind my own business and trust that the results hold up.