Tales of happenings on the farm as written by our farm hand Tyler…
Today Steven and Tyler prepared a field for a fence by taking down its fencing. The fencing the brackets and staples that held the four strands of high-tension wire to the posts that have been there over 20 years buried three and a half feet in the ground, the dropper posts having been there only, comparatively, of recently, though long enough that they were taken to the burn pile after the wire that held the high-tension wire to them was removed and those posts freed. Those posts were not in any depth in the ground and stood free by wire tension and tensioning until today properly freed.
Steven removed the staples, 1.5 inch staples, from the post with a tool for the purpose, Tyler using a philips-headed screw gun to remove the screws holding to the mainstay posts the plastic brackets, which held the wire as staples but with no need for intermediate insulation of extra plastic as the metal staples did. Both Steven and Tyler put the hardware removed in small buckets attached to a belt loop by carabiners of which creation was Steven's and on down into the past. And both removed the wire holding wire to the drop posts, the drop posts they stacked in the bed of the side-by-side after the two and half hour's work was done.
Tomorrow the high-tension wire will be wound to be re-used in time. But for now, the field is as free as the drop posts let drop. As free as the field will ever be, perhaps, if past and presence hold the future as like a concave mirror. And but then the day after tomorrow or in the days after that will come the new woven wire fencing, then the sheep moved from the adjacent pasture across the cow lane to this. And then, we imagine, the field will enjoy the use as much as the Giving Tree [Shel Silverstein] enjoyed being necessary, as the sheep enjoy the new old growth of pasture long ago sowed clover and grass and now this Spring coming again to being beginning again, shooting up leaves of grass and down roots of the same. That was today and that will be tomorrow. But now? Now is rest.