The Walk-about … (another short story)

It had been a long time.

She lifted the catch on the garden shed and went in.

The shed had been built in the earlty 1980’s by her then industrious 60 year old farming father. He had used salvaged boards from the now long-gone sheep barn to give that sturdy little hut its authentic character. (He  had even recycled the door catch from the defunct sheep pen. ) The air was dank and  musty, smelling of small creatures.

Filled with antiquated artefacts, the building seemed a shrine to another era. Rusty coon-catching leg clamps,  fishing rods with  noisy hand-cranking reels, rubber hip waders from duck-hunting days, an old school-house desk with deep initials etched in it: dust covered all. Fractured bird-houses with bottoms, sides and tops missing were abandoned, piled up  in the corner. Even so, these little homes, once built by her dad, oozed matted nesting materials. Likely mice or chipmunks, she thought, as she lifted two of the better ones to the window.

A vast assortment of tins,  and glass jars of nuts & bolts, screws, nails, metal clasps and hammer-ready ‘what-nots’  lined the barn-board shelves on the window wall. All these things, she thought, as she peered & poked around, all these things are the ephemera of Father. Wooden saws, metal seeders, electric egg hatchers, tomato cages and an old-fashioned rotating-blade grass-cutter stood in the corner. All waiting for re-use.

An  immaculately-bound straw-bale leaned against the broken hatch of a disintegrating wire chicken coop.  On the walls, hand-twisted Virginia-creeper vine-wreaths (with pine cones decoratively stuck into the mangled hoops) still hung where she and her sisters had put them some 35 years ago.  The shed was full of memories. An old oak dresser, stripped of finish, balanced on three feet beneath a fanciful wall fresco of vines & leaves. Beside it stood a mismatched bundle of empty picture frames.  She didn’t remember painting that wall. She wondered which one of her sisters had.

Walking over to the broken six-paned window she looked out to the now mature mixed forest woodland.  Their shaggy growth effectively muted the distant rumble of that now busy country highway.

She looked hard at the wood face.

A few of the large lower branches on the older pines were stressing the trees. A number of the straggly hard-wood maples also needed trimming.

Glancing back into the shed she saw a good hand-saw hanging off a hook. She saw tree trimmers leaning against the wrought-iron garden chair with the broken seat.  She could see a pair of nibbled workman’s gloves stuffed into a cracked clay pot on top of the dresser.

After flapping the gloves against her leg to lose the obvious, she tested the teeth of the saw with her thumb.  Good enough. The tree trimmer hinge needed tightening and grease. She did that with an adjustable wrench that she found on the barn-board shelving.  She then squirted a few drops of oil from the greasy oil tin onto the taut bolt.

Ready:  she left the shed …

… and slowly began her walk-about …