Because the weather was beautiful I actually did a thing or two around the house I’d been putting off forEVER.
First, I got out the card table and a tablecloth, set them up in the front yard, and took pictures of the barbed wire collection I’ve had since I was in the seventh grade; I haven’t had it displayed since about 1970, and I’m in no danger of getting it re-displayed as I would want it done. All it’s done is sit on a shelf or under some piece of furniture, with all the pieces un-labelled while I forgot what most of them were. I may as well see if Waring Stuph can sell them to someone who’ll treat them better than I’m doing.
In Texas, schoolkids have to take Texas History classes twice: once in seventh grade, and again in twelfth. My seventh-grade history teacher was Mr. Delaney, who came on in class like Oscar the Grouch, but who actually did know and like Texas history. He realized, like Walter Prescott Webb and many others, that barbed wire was an essential part of Texas history (Comanche County had its footnote or two to add to the wire-cutting wars of the 1870s), and that the many types of wire were interesting of themselves. So one of his every-year assignments was for all the students to go out and collect at least ten different kinds of barbed wire (and in standard eighteen-inch collector’s lengths, too . . . no three-inch, single barb snippets like the ones on those horrible little plaques you see at tourist traps and craft shows), identify them from a collector’s guide, and make a display to be shown at spring Open House. Those who didn’t think they could find enough wire, and had any drawing skills, were allowed to make posters showing different varieties of barb. (I now wonder if he wasn’t a wire collector himself, and hoped to inspire one or two of us to interest in it as well. It never occurred to me to ask, then.)
Well, this assignment seemed to inspire both of my parents to pitch in and help—which was odd, because their interests and hobbies were very divergent. My mother has always been interested in local and Texas history, and my father was a craftsman of one sort of another (usually in metalwork, but sometimes in wood). But the more we all talked about it, the more ideas they seemed to have about how it could be done to make a killer presentation. Dad went out to a tumble-down barn on his mother’s farm and pried off a couple of planks to use for the display board, and pulled up a couple of stay posts from a falling-over cross fence and sliced them in half with the bandsaw to make mounting posts, so the pieces of wire would look as though they were stretched on a real fence.
While he was doing all that, Mother went into her local history files and found a list of the first fifty or so cattle brands registered in Comanche County, right after it was organized. Dad made some mini-running irons from heavy coat hangers and with those and a blowtorch, he burned the brands onto the display board, and then tacked on the cut-down posts (which was difficult; they were so old and rotten, they disintegrated if you looked at them cross-eyed).
Then Dad took me out wire-hunting. Now in rural West or Central Texas, it’s not hard to find wire. There are old rolls and tangles and chevaux-de-frise of it lying along fence lines or pushed into gullies, because it was too much trouble to haul it off when the fence was re-strung thirty or forty or fifty years ago. Nobody much cares about it, unless some livestock gets tangled in a pile of it somehow, and really nobody cares if you go cut yerself a foot and a half piece off a quarter-mile ball-o’-yarn lying in the bottom of a ditch. So Dad and I went driving around, and crawled through some fences and walked around in some other people’s pastures, and wound up with fifteen or so different varieties of wire. And then Herbert Williams, the father of one of Mother’s best friends from childhood, called up one evening and invited us over to their house, and it turned out they were entertaining Henry and Frances McCallum, authors of The Wire That Fenced the West, one of the standard works on the subject. Henry ended up promising to send me some kinds of wire I didn’t have—and sure enough, a few days later, he did just that!
So I did the identifications, Mother typed the information on labels that we “antiqued” with a little brown shoe polish, Dad stapled the pieces of wire onto the posts, and I hauled it it to school to be graded and displayed for Open House. I got an A on the project, which it deserved, because it was head and shoulders above anything else in the room on presentation, and I had one of the best assortments of wire of anyone in any of the classes.
The other thing I did today was to repair the pipe trellis that I made for the roses to climb; now’s the time I better get it put up if I’m gonna do it this season. I unstrung all the cross wires that L had strung months ago, and which, because they kept the uprights from turning, made it impossible for me to replace the broken cross-member at the top. I sliced a flap of skin off my index finger pulling on the wire, which kept kinking itself and getting stuck (did you know that rusty baling wire is sharp, because of the rust flakes? I do, now.), so at last I went and got T to help me; I pulled the wire while she undid the inevitable kinks that formed. Eventually I got it all apart, replaced the broken cross-member, then got the sharpshooter shovel and post-hole digger out of the shed and dug the holes for the trellis to stand in, bashing myself in the crotch once when the shovel blade got stuck under a tree root and then suddenly slipped loose (I still ache). L and I put on the guying twine that I’ll use to guy the trellis once it’s in place and the holes are back-filled, then walked it into the holes, leaning the top against the house for the time being. Next fair day I get, I need to back-fill those holes and set the guy-lines. It won’t be tomorrow, though; while today provided a cloudless sky and high temperatures near eighty, tomorrow’s forecast promises overcast, chances of rain, and highs in the low forties.
A wallpapered geographer is oily. Fnord.
