When I was six or so, my father put up a flagpole in our front yard. Now when I say “flagpole” I’m not talking about one of those three-foot wooden poles that you stick in a bracket screwed to the front porch support post. Our flagpole was twelve feet of two-inch galvanized steel pipe sunk in a 24-inch concrete footing, with pulleys and a halyard and sister hooks and everything the most substantial of commercial flagpoles have. There wasn’t any missing it when we flew a flag.
Now that I have a proper front yard of my own, I want to have a proper flagpole of my own. I have a small collection of flags, from Mexican to Imperial Russian, that I’d enjoy flying on their appropriate non-Yankee holidays (Diez y seis, St. Andrew’s Day, the Tsar’s birthday, the Queen’s birthday, the firing on Fort Sumter) but nowhere to run them up. Digging up and moving the one from my parents’ house is probably a non-starter, although Mother has told me she wouldn’t mind having it out of her front yard; she hasn’t used it in years. I keep eyeing a depression in my front yard that I think is a partly filled-in hole where a tree was removed, but the outright labor of digging a two-foot-deep hole, stepping and guying the pole (once I got and assembled another—I think ten feet would probably be in better scale than twelve for our house), and pouring a concrete footing has discouraged me so far. I haven’t given up on the idea, though. Maybe one day I’ll decide to rent one of those one-man gas-powered augers from Home Despot and have a go.
The OCR salvia burned some alabaster conic sections. Fnord.
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