jumpingfish

#silentsunday

That morning, a fierce wind howled. We could hear its moaning thru the walls of the house. 

Shrub and tree branches whipped dramatically left and right and up and down. A large limb lay on the ground at the base of the Walnut tree. The garbage cans fell over. The sticks and trimmings in the yard waste can were gone, evidently having been blown down the street and maybe piled up in the corner of someone’s yard.

The car shook as I commuted east in the pre-dawn light.

The rising sun struggled to shine.

Let’s talk about “sawbucks” again. Steely-eyed mjb observed that they seem to be the same as “sawhorses”. I mean there are sawhorses and there are sawbucks.

Go look. I’ll wait.

Same thing, right? But no. Check out this  article about building a sawbuck out of logs, and take a moment to look at that the guy’s sawbuck.

Not a sawhorse.

I’m reminded (no surprise perhaps) of linear algebra. It was all about matrices. We added, subtracted, and inverted them. We diagonalized and decomposed them. We did all this, and then we were done … until I find out later, in the twilight of my years, that a matrix is just a particular way to calculate a linear transformation. The matrices are mere representations. The important concepts are the transformations. I missed the memo!

So don’t wait until your twilight years! Read the memo. Know your concepts. A sawhorse is a sawhorse, and a sawbuck is something else. 

I’m not waiting any longer. There’s an hour to go before the Central Time ball drops. But my laptop is down to 20%, the fair and industrious Trudy has long given up the ghost, Miss Izzy is catatonic under my AHIHA hockey jersey, the Zyrtec is having its side-effect, and so let’s do this. One last fish for 2023.

The Red Oaks know their time. Their burgundy leaves turn brown and fall to the ground.

In the brisk wind last week, I raked leaves into ever-metamorphosing piles, gathered them up, took them into the back yard, mulched them with the mower, and dumped them onto this year’s new compost pile. A day later, the center of the pile was hot in spite of it being baby-it’s-cold outside (in a Central Texas kind of way).

Today is far from cold. The sun is shining, and the sky is blue. It’s too warm for a sweater. A good day for a swim.

In the sun, wasps and bees and manifold flittering insectoids are happy with the wildflower blossoms that persist even with the fallen leaves all around. The wildflowers don’t seem to particularly care about time, hanging on as long as the pollinators hang around.

Happy New Year.

1. The Need

Was it ten years ago? Maybe fifteen. According to the fair and industrious Trudy, Ben was still in high school, so … 14 years ago. That’s how long ago this was.

There I was standing in our driveway rasumfrassing to myself amidst a bunch of scattered branches. I was tired of cutting fallen tree limbs precariously perched on the garbage can. I needed a sawbuck. 

I once saw a sawbuck made by a cousin of mine. He had slapped it together from scrap in a couple minutes just to make … well, to simplify the cutting of fallen tree limbs. Just what I needed. And I recalled my cousin whipping this thing together as naturally and second-nature to him as  … deriving the Lagrange planetary equations might once have been to me. Ok so perhaps as second-nature as … deriving the quadratic formula would be for me now. QED. That’s how quickly I remembered him assembling that thing.

I had had enough. I needed a sawbuck.

2. Sawbuck v1.0

Remember now, this is 10 or 15 or 14 years ago.

There I was in the driveway with the branches about me. In my rasumfrassage, I determined to make me a sawbuck.

Of course, there were some long-ago scrounged 2x4s in the garage and some oft-used and oft-straightened über-nails. These would have been sufficient, but I had something more in mind. Earlier that day, I had spied a pile of lumber by the curb down the street. Someone was throwing away perfectly good stuff.

I walked down to inspect. And I proudly returned with six long, pristine tongue-and-groove boards under my arms. I set the boards down. Got the 2x4s. Got the nails. And got some screws that many years before I had scrounged from my father’s basement when he sold his house (which would have been like 30 years ago?).

And I proceeded to make me a sawbuck.

3. Sawbuck v2.0

In the years since, the sawbuck has served its purpose well. But that was 10 or 15 or 14 years ago. You remember that, right? (See the opening sentence above.)

Time has passed. The weather has taken its toll, as it will on a sawbuck left out in the elements. Those tongue-and-groove boards have utterly decomposed. So this afternoon I decided that my sawbuck had become a hazard.

The scrounged 2x4s and über-nails from which the business-end of the sawbuck was composed are fine. My father’s basement-stashed screws were still in pristine shape. And there were four tongue-and-groove boards from that years-ago pile down the street remaining in the garage, stacked neatly where I put them them 10 or 15 or 14 years ago. (Ok not right where I put them then, but near enough by.)

Shining sun. Blue sky. Frische Luft. Fast-forward a bit (as you might wish me to do about now), and … I’ve got me a brand-ish new sawbuck. It’s a double doozie. This time I treated the tongue-and-groove boards with Australian Timber Oil, so the boards shouldn’t decompose so quickly, right? They should last … what … 20 years? 

When that time does come, the two remaining tongue-and-groove boards from the pile down the street will be waiting in the garage for Sawbuck v3.0.