21
Aug (Wed) Up at dawn; another long day ahead with little reward
other than a pure, keen satisfaction with the gift of my life. ◦◦◦◦◦
An incident that I forgot to record on 16 August: I’d fixed the
people-gate [a narrow gap in a fence that people can squeeze through
but not livestock] in the back fence, on the other side of the river,
and then was tightening the wires on that section of fence between
the river and the gate. I walked down to the river to see how that
bit of fence looked and stumbled on a 2½ foot length of an old fence
post—a sawed-off “splinter” roughly 2” in diameter. It was
lying in the meadow, keeping grass from growing under it. Since the
thing didn’t belong there, I picked it up and flung it behind me,
end-over-end, towards the gravel-bar (where I knew it’d wash away
next spring in the flood). But this casual act turned into a
breathtaking moment of perfection, absurd perfection. ◦◦◦◦◦
I flung it under-handed while bent over—backwards…behind me—as
hard as I could to get it onto the gravel, about 40 feet away. I
heard it whang into the fence—Sproi-oi-oing!—and
turned at the weird sound to see it quivering there, stuck between
the wires. I stood gawking as it slowly swayed to a stop. The thing
was sandwiched between the bottom three of the four strands of barbed
wire, straight up & down, centered perfectly with either end
protruding several inches beyond a wire. ◦◦◦◦◦ Left it
there as a testimony to utterly random events everywhere. A hundred
people could throw sticks at a barbwire fence for a hundred years and
never repeat this act. I suppose most people wouldn’t think
anything of this—except that it was ha-ha funny, maybe—but to me,
it had the flavor of a minor miracle.
Copyright 2014 Tim Forsell
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