The hands of the village blacksmith

Wherever there’s a horse, a blacksmith isn’t far away. They are craftsman who use heat and hammers to forge metal into horseshoes, chandeliers, railings, and barn, or gate hinges. While I appreciate their handiwork as they gradually shape heated metal into a useful and even ornamental shape, I am more fascinated by their hands.

We can learn a lot about a person by watching their hands. Body language experts watch a person’s hands as they communicate with someone to determine what they are really saying. We watch a mechanic use his hands to determine what is wrong with our car. We watch a mom hold her newborn child, and we see the wrinkled hands of an elderly person and wonder what kind of life they led.

Over the course of the next couple of weeks, we will be compiling many of our hand images from various parts of the world into a fine art piece. I will share some of my favorites with you as we move along in the project. Where they are from is immaterial as the message of the hands, transcends all cultures and all languages.

Mouse in the house

'Twas Saturday night and all through the house not a creature was stirring except one little mouse. It was that little annoying, scratching, scraping noise somewhere in the walls surrounding our living room that caught my attention. But like many noises, if no one else is around to hear them (like my wife), then there is no noise at all. Of course, every time I moved around the room to find the mouse, he didn't.

Sunday morning, I heard him again, but this time so did Lois. Now the mouse and I were both as good as dead. The mouse if I caught him and me if I didn't. On a desperate whim, I opened the spring-loaded hose door for the built-in house vacuum system that we have never used. There he was staring right back at me. He was just as surprised as I was, and I know if he could have run straight up the eight foot plastic pipe to the attic, he would have.

I spoke nicely to him to coax him out. I even put one of our ubiquitous Tupperware containers with a dab of peanut butter in it over the opening and held it against the wall for about ten minutes. I continued our negotiations, but he just wasn't hungry.

I began to think like my mentor, Tim Taylor on the Home Improvement sitcom, who always found a newer, bigger, and more powerful way to do something. I thought maybe the mouse would, like any kid and many adults, enjoy a high speed thrill ride through a looped and twisted pneumatic hose. It's not often that I get to bring the Shop-Vac into the living room at ten in the evening, but desperation had finally set in. I turned on the Shop-Vac, opened his door, and gave the little guy the biggest thrill ride he ever had.

Note:  No mice were actually hurt in the creation of this blog. He's just a little colder because he's now in the woods where he belongs rather than in my walls, where he doesn't.

Unhinged.

We were in an old Connecticut hardware store one day and found this great wall of used hinges. Some were brass or bronze, and others, iron. Some were made for front doors and barn doors, others for sheds, and some for gates. I was especially intrigued with the beautiful workmanship, but hanging on the wall, they were useless. They had become unhinged, and hung on the wall just hoping someone would notice. Do you know the feeling?

They were created by a blacksmith to have both form and function. He saw a purpose for each one before he formed it. We see the form, but unless they are attached to a gate or a door, they have no function. Perhaps they got bent out of shape, or rusty, and just could not perform anymore. Now all they do is hang around, waiting, hoping, that someone will notice their potential and once again use them to let people pass through the gate. After all that's why they were created in the first place.

Valentine’s Day

We’ve come a long way since St. Valentine was martyred for secretly marrying young Roman soldiers against the orders of Claudius who thought marriage was a distraction to his young warriors.

Now, in memory of St. Valentine, we buy candy, flowers, cards, dinners and other romantic gifts for those we love. Hallmark and other greeting card companies have spent every day since Christmas reminding us to remember.

While the memory of our sentiments will carry momentum for a while, depending on how fresh the flowers and how large the box of chocolates, Hallmark and the candy industry will move right into the Easter holiday, tomorrow. It’s just the American way, thank you very much.

What on earth am I here for?

Have you ever asked yourself the question, “What on earth am I here for?” A few years ago, I managed a seven week PR campaign for a special event around this group of seven words. Each week I emphasized a different word by bolding it, and each week, the question took on a new meaning. "What on earth am I here for?" The focus of the event was to zero in and define ones purpose in life.

Think of the purpose of your life, or someone else’s life, as a dinner table full of everyday clean dishes. As you look at the workmanship of the designer, notice each one is a different size, shape, or color, depending on the intended purpose. Some dishes are designed to serve the main course, the focus of attention. Some dishes are side dishes designed specifically to serve soup, salad, or bread, and of course, dessert, all of which support, or enhance, the main course. Other dishes hold cream, sugar, gravy, sauces, jams or jellies. They are often placed in the center of the table and used as needed. At the end of the meal, the designer sits back with a cup of coffee, tea or cappuccino and looks over the table of dishes and evaluates how well they fulfilled the purpose that he intended for each one.

So what is your purpose? What were you designed to do? Do you hold the gravy or the sugar? How do you interact with others every day at home, in your community, at the office? What role do you play? Are you really a side dish, but your ego gets in the way and demands to be a dinner plate, or are you meant to be the dinner plate, but you would rather be an out-of-the-way supporting saucer?

Like the dishes, each one of us is designed to serve a specific purpose, and life just wouldn’t be the same without you doing what the designer intended for you to do.

Breaktime

This past weekend was a great time to take a break and enjoy a cup of coffee at your favorite neighborhood bistro, or on your deck, and let the warm sun work away on your ice and snow.

If you have been keeping up with our blog, you know we’ve been using panty hose stuffed with sodium chloride on our ice-dammed roof edges, we’ve drilled holes in our soffits, and we’ve banged and chipped to break the ice in our downspouts. I even climbed ladders to pull 18 inches of snow off the roof with a homemade roofrake and poured boiling water into the top of our two story downspouts. We have used more than ten gallons of gas in our snow blower and 200 pounds of salt on our driveway. They all worked a little bit, until sunset, that is when everything froze again.

Saturday and Sunday, God took over and gave us sun. It was like one massive dose of a decongestant kicking in. Everything ran. All we had to do was sitback and take a break from all our own feeble deicing attempts and watch the sun take over. I know we’re not suppose to waste time watching water boil, but kicking back with a cup of coffee watching weeks of ice and snow buildup melt away is a bigger thrill than I ever imagined.

All things considered, it has been a beautiful winter and I wouldn’t trade it for all the warm weather anywhere, even though my wife might. Each season has it’s own challenges and each is marked by it’s own unique beauty.

Man's best friend

Our son-in-law, Troy, had just hunkered down into a couple of feet of snow to photograph his kids as they came flying down the hill in our front yard, when Annie decided to see what he was doing. Like most dogs, when someone is on her level, she likes to find out why. I'm not sure who is concentrating more, but I know a good ear-lick would get Troy's attention real fast.

"Snow" much fun!

This past weekend we were blessed by a visit from our daughter and her family who drove up from Delaware. Rather than taking pictures in the studio, we thought we would shoot outside in the snow for a change. Their mom and dad said, "Just make sure your cameras are all ready when they go out because after about ten minutes of cold snow, they are cold, bored and back inside."

Their dad packed down a great sled run on the hill in our front yard and two hours and 200 pictures later, I came inside. They stayed out. "We don't have hills in Delaware, Grandad," they said. It seems all they do at home is run around their flat yard for a while, and hopefully, someone will pull them on a sled as there are no hills in Delaware.

Kids have a great way of humbling us into seeing the lighter side of things, and when I see smiles like these, it makes all this snow and ice worth it.

Ice dams and roof rakes

When you made an ugly face as a kid (we all did), did your mother say, “Someday your face is going to freeze like that?” Yesterday as I was dealing with ice jams, my face did freeze, not because it was ugly but because it was so cold at gutter level on my roof, and my frustration level was at its max.

It all started Sunday as I was breaking ice on the roof above my deck. The ice was about ten inches thick and had crept up the roof at glacier speed about two feet. I worked with a carbon steel chisel and a three pound mason’s hammer and managed to break about six feet of the ice in two hours. The ugly face freeze happened when I realized I had about 175 lineal feet of gutter to go and a roof full of snow eighteen inches deep. There just had to be a solution.

Monday morning I called about twenty hardware stores looking for a roof rake to pull the snow down. That was a joke as people are standing in lines around here like they do at Best Buy on Black Friday just waiting to get one of the three hundred or so snow rakes that might come on the truck that day.

While I was on the phone, I was trolling my Facebook page and suddenly a friend’s friend posted a solution for ice dams on rooftops—calcium chloride in panty hose laid along the ice dam on the roof and in the gutter below. (Apparently ice-damology is a science of some sort here in Connecticut.) “It works every time.” “There’s a Youtube video about it.” The comments and likes in support of this kinky solution convinced me to try it. However, I was only going to do it after dark and on the rear roof for fear my neighbors might put me on some kind of watch list. By eight o’clock, I had two pair of one-size-fits-all taupe panty hose stuffed with ice melt stretched across my back roof. I must admit I was surprised at how far those things could stretch. They were like water balloons on steroids.

As far as the rake was concerned, I ended up making one. About eight years ago I bought a brass door threshold for my “next weekend project,” which fortunately never happened. I carefully unwrapped it and duck taped it to a garden rake. I taped the rake handle to a twelve foot tree trimmer handle and spent the better part of today pulling a couple of tons of ice and snow off part of my roof.

The jury is still out on the panty hose anti ice dammers, but my Rube Goldberg roof rake worked so well that my frustration has waned and my face has finally relaxed.