Detritus

It's here again- that strange time of year in Iowa City when rental leases start drawing to a close and big piles of free stuff start appearing on curb sides. Last summer, fresh from Georgia, I'd drive around with Janelle, Eleanor, or Cousin Lesley and hunt for pieces of furniture, objects d'art, & raw materials to strap down to the roof of our Jeep. Got some nice stuff...I mean, you know...nice enough.

It's weird, though. You can find it all: sofas, mattresses, fruit juicers, toasters, pipe fittings, crates of paperbacks, c.d. cases, pant suits, bookshelves, photo albums, inexplicable piles of wood, curtain rods, reams of paper, computer monitors...the detritus of the broke and collegiate in transition. You can look down just about any street in this town this time of year and see discordant little Jabba The Hutt's all lined up to the horizon for Homeboy Trashboy. But not before us bottom feeders get out there and do a little recon...

If you're lucky, you'll find a pile that hasn't been sifted through yet. If you're unlucky you'll get there five minutes too late. All the sweet stuff will have been spirited away by nimble hands...or worse - the rains will have already turned that pile into a heap of post-industrial mush. Best to avoid these piles. Nothing to be gained there. The above photo was taken through a privacy fence I erected in our front yard a few weeks ago. It was constructed from pieces of lattice, 2x4's, and crown molding I scavenged from the piles. It ain't pretty, but it serves its purpose.

Building objects out of scavenged wood is probably my favorite thing to do when I'm not writing. I absolutely love it - maybe even more than I love growing tomatoes. It's a wonderful enterprise. It's a hands-on experiment in planning, problem solving, engineering, mathematics, luck, and technical execution...you get to be your own boss, and when it's all over, you have this fence or gate or box or birdhouse or whatever that is so totally unique, as its the product of unique circumstances and chance occurrences.