The Clothespin Bag

Mary Steinhoff's clothespin bag 05-07-2016I’m at the stage of life where I should be getting rid of stuff instead of acquiring more, so I haven’t claimed a lot of things from Mother’s house. One thing I snagged was the clothespin bag she’d hook over the line while hanging up the laundry.

She and Wife Lila both preferred to dry clothes and sheets where the wind and sunlight can do the job, even though perfectly good dryers were available.

Wood cart Plan A didn’t work

Mary and Ken Steinhoff loading firewood 10-13-2004The basement has some furnace ducts, but most of the heat comes from a wood-burning fireplace. For Mother’s 2004 Birthday Season, I bought her a garden cart that has been featured in a bunch of funny family photos.

The only problem was that it could just barely make it through the basement door, and, when fully loaded, weighed more than she did.

It became the wood depot

Basement Kingsway Dr 10-13-2004Whenever one of us boys hit town, we’d load the cart to the brim for her to draw from if the weather was too bad to go outside to replenish the wood bins on either side of the fireplace

The bright-colored fold-up thing on the left wide of the photo was the laundry cart she’d use to haul the wet clothes down the hill to the “garden” where the clothesline lived.

“It’s too nice for wood”

For short hauls from the wood stacked outside to the bins, she’d load the firewood into a clumsy metal cart that would just as likely dump its load as carry it if it wasn’t balanced just right. On top of that, the wheels and axles had long gone kaput, and Brother Mark had “repaired” them with axles that were about two inches too long on each side, so they’d snag the door weather stripping on the way through.

I hated that bleeping cart, so I bought her a nice-sized heavy-duty plastic cart that wasn’t too heavy, was well-balanced and would fit through the door.

“Smile and say ‘thank you'”

Mary Steinhoff gets new washer 10-16-2008After she had a fit about it, (leading to a discussion about “what you do when someone gives you a gift, even if you don’t want it,” leading to the right answer, “You grit your teeth, smile and say, ‘thank you.'”) but, eventually, she smiled and said, “Thank you.”

The only problem was that she didn’t want to “get it dirty,” so she wouldn’t put firewood in it. It got pressed into service replacing that cloth rolling laundry cart, which WAS a good second choice.

This, by the way, was her cranky expression. We got that during Birthday Season 2008 when she came home to find out that we had replaced her washer, which was leaking water all over the floor. We finally convinced her that it wasn’t a good idea to be standing in water while operating an electrical appliance.

She was more accepting by 2009

Sending it on its wayShe was ready to kick her old dryer to the curb in 2009, so we didn’t get much resistance when we replaced it.

Mark and I kept trying to convince her to let us move the clothesline closer to the house so she wouldn’t roll down the hill, be buried under a bunch of wet clothes, then drained dry by a cloud of mosquitoes, but she wouldn’t hear of it.

By last fall, we could tell her energy was fading because she was using the dryer more and more. Mark and I planned to surprise her with a new clothesline, but we never got the chance.

Laundry on the line

Malcolm running through laundry 10-06-2007I’ll keep Mother’s clothespin bag hanging in my office, and Wife Lila will keep hanging laundry on the line for grandkids like Malcolm, age three at the time, to run through. (Here’s the video version of it.)

When I went away to school at Ohio University, the semester was winding down; I was working as photo editor for the school paper, and I had a bunch of final exam work to get done, so Mother’s Day slipped by unobserved.

That mistake made me sure it never happened again, hence this post. Happy Mother’s Day!

 

 

 

How to Cut Down a Tree

Woodpile at 1618 Kingway Drive Nov 1961Like most males of a certain age, I have an aversion to reading directions. HAD I picked up the Manual of Manual Labor before I started cutting firewood, I probably would have seen Rule One: Avoid it.

See, I mentioned before that I can usually pull out my Medicare Card when I’m with Brother Mark or Sons Matt and Adam to get out of work, but I suspect that when your mother is 91 and counting, her card is senior to mine.

Master of the chain saw

Ken Steinhoff Hurricane Frances clean-ip 09-12-2004So, to back up: we had a windstorm blow through Cape that took down some big branches off a maple tree on the west side of the house. I bought an electric chain saw (I get along with gas saws just about as well as I coexist with plumbing) and made short work of cutting it up into lengths we could put in the fireplace. [This was me doing damage to the trees and limbs we had blow down in our yard in West Palm Beach during Hurricane Frances in 2004. I look much the same today. Trees tremble around me.]

“Just in case”

Cape ice storm 02-21-2013_2555When the ice storm was predicted, we decided (Mother decided, waving her Medicare Card), that we should bring in extra firewood and kindling “just in case.”

This year’s wood must have been dryer than usual because there was very little left on the pile after filling the garden cart and two storage bins in the basement. We decided (Mother decided, waving her Medicare Card) to harvest whatever dead wood there was in the yard “just in case.”

I had been eying a dead snag on the east side of the yard for some time. It looked big enough to provide a lot of wood, but small enough that I could handle it with my 16″saw.

Boy Scouts used “squaw wood”

Boy Scout pre-camporee involving Boy Scout Troop 8 in 1963 In my Boy Scout days, we didn’t get to cut down many trees at camp. Like NO trees at camp. We were told to gather “squaw wood,” defined in the Scout Handbook as “the kind Indian women used to collect by simply breaking it off.” You probably won’t find that phrase used in today’s Handbook.  Anyway, after I took off to college, Dad came up with a great money-making scheme for my brothers’ Order of the Arrow Chapter: he had woods that needed to be cleared for roads; he had trucks; he had chainsaws and he had parents of boys 14 to 18-years-old who didn’t see anything wrong with putting that combination together to cut firewood.

So far as I know, Dad always came home with the same number of boys he started with; the boys got to do a “man’s work” with dangerous tools, and people needing firewood got a great deal. Of course, that’s in the days when chainsaws were considered tools, not killing machines wielded by hockey-mask-wearing crazy guys in slasher movies.

I’m an experienced tree trimmer

Tree trimming in West Palm Beach back yard 09-14-2009

Despite my lack of Boy Scout experience, I HAVE managed to down a tree or two. Here’s an account of one of those adventures.

OK, I’ll confess, that’s my tree, but that’s not me IN my tree. I could have done that if I had wanted to, though.

I accounted for old fence wire

Tree with fence in it 02-23-2013I sized up the tree, decided I wanted it to fall to the southwest into the back yard where I could cut it up with a minimum of hauling. The trees on two sides of our yard had been used as fence posts going back probably 70 years or more. The ones on the east side were pretty much rusted away by the time we moved in 57 years ago. Still, I knew I’d have to watch out for nails and fence wire. I started my notch cut about four feet above the ground, above the visible wire.

All went well for about 23 seconds, then the saw bucked a few times and I watched sparks fly out of my cut. Not ALL of the wire was visible. I changed my angle, cut about 17 seconds, with the same result. The notch wasn’t as big as I would like, but it’ll do, I thought.

Nails must have been cheap

Tree with fence in it 02-23-2013I made the top angle cut, pretending not to notice the sparks, then switched to the back of the tree to make the hinge cut. MORE sparks. If the fence wire I could SEE was 70 years old, then there must have been another fence hanging off that tree 90 years ago, because it was at least 1-1/2 inches under the surface.

I had other stuff to cut, so I didn’t want to kill the saw blade. “I’ll drive wedges into the hinge cut,” I thought. Shouldn’t take much to get the tree to decide gravity should take over. Three big wedges and a 6-pound sledge earned me a slight cracking sound. From the way the tree hadn’t changed position, I surmised the cracking sound was coming from my back.

Earlier in the procedure, I worked a rope up the tree as high as I could, figuring that I could “encourage” the tree to fall in that direction if I got it rocking. Unfortunately, the tree was leaning against a dead branch from another tree about 30 feet in the air. It had been there long enough that it had cut a deep groove in the branch. It wouldn’t rock.

Saw blade slick as dental floss

Tree with fence in it 02-23-2013Finally, I decided that I had had enough. I didn’t care if I made the saw blade as slick as a piece of dental floss: I was tired of swinging that sledge. Ignoring the fireworks show going on, I cut all the way through the hinge to the notch. I could see light through it. The tree was ignoring the law of gravity.

Where are the pictures of all this? Well, Mother was standing by keeping a close eye on the proceedings. She had a whip in one hand to encourage me to keep working, and a cell phone in the other so she could dial 9-1-1. Her camera was in her pocket. She hadn’t planned to pull it out unless there was blood, at which point she would take a picture and faint dead away. When she woke up, THEN she would dial 9-1-1.

Use a longer rope

I pulled on the rope. With a loud crack, the tree starting falling in my direction. Hint: if your tree is 30 feet tall, use at least a 40-foot rope, not a 25-foot one. “I never knew you could run so fast,” Mother observed, having dropped the whip and picked up the camera.

Amazing what you can do with the right encouragement.

Well, the story isn’t over. While taking down the tree, I noticed a dead one that had fallen just down the slope. Since I already had the saw and the electric cord down there, I elected to cut it up, too. That involved cutting a piece of wood, throwing up the slope as far as I could, then picking up it and throwing it the rest of the way to the yard. Keep track of those steps. It’ll become important later.

Was farmer keeping out bats?

Tree with fence in it 02-23-2013Now it was time to cut up the primary tree. I started at the top, slender, end. It cut about as well as you would expect a piece of dental floss to cut. It didn’t cut so much as worry the wood to death.

Then, about four feet from the butt end, which would have been about eight feet above the ground, I hit fence wire again. I don’t know what the farmer was trying to keep in or keep out, but it had to have been bats or giraffes. Mother had gone to get her hair done, so I took this opportunity to throw the four-foot snag waaaay down the hill where I hoped she wouldn’t notice it.

THIS is the cart

Mary Steinhoff 2004 Birthday SeasonOur back yard has two levels. I pulled the garden cart down to pick up the wood from down the hill. That’s the wood that I had already picked up at least twice. I put it into the cart, then pulled the cart up a 40% grade to the main yard, where I put in the big stuff from the primary tree. Some other large branches had fallen on the east side of the yard, so I cut them up, loaded the cart and headed toward the basement. The only problem was that I couldn’t steer the cart: a nut on the bolt that attached the steering handle to the cart had evidently worked loose. The only solution was to unload the cart so I could replace the bolt and nut.

I’ve touched it five-plus times

Steinhoff wood and fireplace 02-21-2013That meant that I had to touch those pieces a fourth time. After I got the cart fixed, it dawned on me that it wouldn’t make much sense to haul an empty cart inside, so I loaded it back up. We’re now up to a minimum of five touches per piece of wood. Much of the wood went into bins on the left and right side of the fireplace. That brings us to six or seven touches.

I’m tempted to NAME the firewood

Steinhoff wood and fireplace 02-21-2013Throwing it into the fireplace will be the eighth time (minimum) I’ve moved it. The final step will be carrying out the ashes. I’ve seen each piece of wood so many times I’m tempted to name it.

Fireplaces and Basement Stairs

I like working in the basement here in Cape. I miss my nice office chair and my film scanner and all the negatives just a swivel away, don’t get me wrong, but the basement is very conducive to my style of writing. It’s a procrastinator’s paradise.

First off, there’s the fireplace. Mother has a gas furnace, but she also has a basement fireplace that helps heat the basement and the rest of the house. The chimney for it runs up the wall between the kitchen and the living room, so when you get the fireplace good and warm, the wall becomes one big radiator. It feels so good to lean up against it and suck heat into your body after you’ve been out in the cold.

The best part is that you have to futz with it.

When I’m working back home, I’ll sometimes go for hours except for necessary breaks and naps. With a fireplace, you have to get up about every 20 minutes to give it a poke. The wood’s pretty dry, so you have to add a piece about every 30 minutes.

If you ignore it and let it burn down to coals, then you have to add some kindling and coax it into life with a few puffs. When the wood stack gets low in the house, you have to wheel the garden cart outside to reload it. That means you have to reapply the tarps that keep it dry. You calculate for a minute if you have to bring in a sandbag full of kindling we made when we cut up an old picket fence down in Dutchtown.

Then, there’s the decision about whether or not to let the fire to burn out so you can carry the ashes outside. That leads to another assessment: are the coals dead enough that you can pour them out in the backyard or is there a danger they might flare up and catch the leaves on fire?

Now that newspapers have gotten miniscule, you have to husband the few scraps of paper you can glean from junk mail and cardboard boxes and decide if you want to go for broke and build it all at one time or do you get a little kindling started and then add the bigger wood. Are you going to use the dry wood from last year or should you ration it out as firestarter for later in the winter?

See how much time you can fritter away tending a fireplace?

The only time I considered smoking

I worked with a reporter who was a pipe smoker. He could control the ebb and flow of an interview by how he worked his pipe. If he wanted time to think of the next question, or if he wanted to let silence build hoping that the subject would feel awkward and fill the silence, he’d reach for his pipe.

First, he’d go through the ritual of cleaning it out. Then the fumble in all his pockets for the tobacco. He had to find the right tool to tamp it down in the bowl. That was another search. Eventually he’d need a match. More inventory-taking. Sometimes when I KNEW he had a match, I’d watch him ask the subject for one just to get a flow going.

The only other guy I saw milk a tobacco product as effectively was Hal Holbrook playing Mark Twain smoking a cigar. Those guys had it down to an art.

I did a personality assessment and decided I couldn’t be a pipe smoker. I was like the old cheapskate who said, “When I’m smoking my own tobacco, all I can think of is the cost. If I’m smoking another man’s tobacco, the bowl is packed so tight it won’t draw.”

Basement stairs for cardio

If I want a drink or a snack in Florida, it’s about 20 feet straight into the kitchen. Way too convenient.

Here in Cape, I have to walk across the length of the basement – that’s 11 steps (15 if I divert to check the fireplace) – then it’s up two stairs, hit the landing, turn, then 10 stairs up. People pay good money to go to the gym for that kind of workout on a Stairmaster.