it’s not done in this picture.

I built a bridge today.
That’s how my friend ended his blog post and it’s how I’m starting mine.

For the past few months I’ve tried to use only scrap while doing projects around the place. When I moved I tore down the old shop and filled my barn with odds and ends. I used almost all of what remained for this bridge.

I’ll have to buy wood now.

From a store. 

The long pieces are cherry, which is an almost unthinkable luxury for a bridge that’s going to span my brook, but it’s what I’ve got. I bought loads of the stuff from an old farmer just a few miles down the road.

He said that before he sold his family farm, a thing he regrets bitterly, he went across the more than 100 acres and chopped down every single cherry tree to spite the developer he sold to.

My friend Arclamp responded to yesterdays post with his own. He came down very solidly on the side of useless things being better than useful ones. 

As I putzed around my house today I thought about all of the things I ought to be doing or that I could be doing and the usefulness or uselessness of them.

What was a more use(ful)(less) thing to do with my time today?

- finish the shelf in the kitchen
- clear out some brush by the forest path
- build a bridge for the brook
- organize the shop a bit
- practice the violin

None of those things felt particularly useless, though I do feel pretty useless at the violin, so that’s good. This place, and when I say that I mean my house and the handful of acres around it, is an ongoing project that I will never complete. It’s a place to live, and, I hope, to do so well. It won’t stand the test of time, but nothing will. Does that make it useless? In a good way or a bad way? I like that this place is tucked away, more important than anything else to me and maybe, two other people, maybe a third in a year, maybe a fourth in two, who knows?

It’s a place to practice the useless and to think about God, and friends.
It’s nice to have friends, to be in a place where they are, like to be, and have got stuff to do but haven’t got to do it, together.

Maybe I’ll write about my grandfather’s mausoleum tomorrow, I think that’s related. 

Bozo.