Fence Mending
You live long enough in one place, trust me, you’ll spend your golden years repairing the things you built. Fences, outbuildings, roofs, gates, probably all of it if you were an itinerant carpenter like myself. I didn’t really build stuff to last, don’t ask me why, just figured fast is good, go for the artsy-fartsy, don’t worry, be happy. I did try to build our house to last, maybe the only thing I figured might be worth the additional effort. And forget about that chestnut of Ben Franklin’s: any job worth doing is worth doing well. Total BS! Let’s move along, Ben, not every damn job is worth killing yourself over.
Needless to say, now that I’m a senior citizen, what down here on the salty South End qualifies as an Old Fart, half my time is spent tearing down, repairing, salvaging and otherwise wrestling with my too many buildings, old fences, rotting wellhouses and odd experiments in architecture and art. It’s not as if I didn’t expect to outlive these things, I just couldn’t wrap my mind around future maintenance issues. Probably figured when they go to rust and rot and ruin, hell, build another one.
I wouldn’t say Laziness is a virtue, but in my case, it seems to be a creed of some sort, one I probably wouldn’t recommend to the kids, but at this late date, I really hate to spend my last years re-evaluating life choices or character traits. Besides, I have fences to rebuild, roofs that leak, orchards to prune, hedges to keep back, plumbing problems and … well, hell, the list is endless. At some point I may have to let the past go. All those regrets, the disappointments, even the successes … the fences can’t be mended, what was kept out will eventually come on in, let it go, just let it go.
With luck you won’t question why you built the fence in the first place.
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Tags: Entropy, Eternal To-Do List, Rebuilding