My thoughts were drawn back to the old “Nature” versus “Nurture” argument the other day while working on building a picket fence for the north side of my driveway. Before I go too much farther I suppose I should set up the situation a little so that you have a chance to follow along.
Oft times while growing up my brothers, Barry and Jeff, made vociferous claim that I was not related to them in any fashion. They went so far with the representation as to create in their own minds at least an entire experience in which I joined the family.
According to them, one summer while on one of our father’s fabulous 24 states in 21 day tours, Barry came across me huddled under a rock in a campground out in the middle of the desert.
Note the allegory here, I wasn’t found sleeping in the rushes and thus evoking Moses; I wasn’t found sleeping next to a campfire evoking either Rumpelstiltskin or Paul Bunyon; nope, I was found under a rock in the God forsaken desert; thereby giving them license to treat me as just another dark crawly thing instead of a human being. License they regularly took.
In any case, according to their tale Barry found me and told Jeff and Jeff carelessly spilled the beans to Mom. And as you all know, Mom was of course far too compassionate and generous to leave me there and thus I became a Vandermolen by right of “drag-along” (kinda like how Jeff tried to get a Basset Hound one time), though not of true blood (not sure that Bassett was either) and without the choke hold of a rope around my neck either.
Based on that representation of “fact” my brothers often claimed that any tendencies that I had that were similar to theirs were only because I learned from them and not because there was anything “natural” in the behavior in and of itself.
Okay onwards to the picket fence.
Some 27 years back or there about I purchased several premade cedar picket fence sections from Home Depot to fence the yard for a dog for my son and daughter. In the time between those fence sections have served to corral one dog, one goat, two lambs, one archery range, and a bit of garden now and then. All in different locations.
Over the years the termites have taken their toll on the pickets, posts and rails while the lichen or moss has had its way with just about all of it. The pickets were covered in green moss, the soft grain carved concave and the bottom several inches of pickets and posts termite riddled with dry rot chasing the termites up and down the length of the rails.
What with this whole Covid pandemic and the fact that retirement is hinting at me from the sidelines I have been exploring less on weekends and accomplishing more around the house. Now that old Dutchman who raised me (father or not as the brothers claim) taught me long ago there are two things you never want to own…the best looking place on the block, or the worst looking place on the block, cause either way you won’t get your money’s worth when you go to sell.
So the day came when I looked at those old fence sections leaning up against the oak tree and thought: “those thigns are an eyesore and should be run to the dump”. But along with teaching me about houses on blocks, My dad also taught me that “it not what you make, but what you don’t spend that counts” and so instead of loading them in a trailer for the dump I thought: “you know, there has never been a fence next to the driveway, I’ll just clean those up a little bit and build one”.
Cleaning up a “little bit” equaled pressure washing each linear inch of every board (all four sides) on each fence section, knocking the pickets loose from what was left of the rails, cutting up and burning the rails in the BBQ pit sitting alternately feeding the fire and hammering the old nails out of the pickets so as not to get a scratch and lockjaw (or is it hydrophobia?) and to be able to stain and then fix the pickets back into something that looked like a fence.
It was along about the hammering time that the whole nature versus nurture issue came back to my mind. Was I busy salvaging these old things cause I was just another tight fisted Dutchman? Or was I tight fisted because of the pattern observed as a boy growing up?
Am I disturbed that the whole topic didn’t come up when I was faced with the decision to drive to the dump with these old 27 year old pieces of termite riddled rotted wood and just buy nice fresh usable fence sections on the way home? Honestly, no. You see my father once had my brothers and I help him salvage some light fixtures, wire, conduit and switches from the Pleasanton Fairgrounds along about when I was 8 and I know for a fact that even though close to 55 years have gone by and Dad now lives 1200 miles from Pleasanton…he still has some of that wire and conduit with him “cause someday I might use that stuff”.
So no, it wasn’t pulling the old dead vines off of those fence sections, nor the pressure washing, nor the knocking apart, nor burning old wood. It wasn’t even the by then planned staining (using leftover stain from the front retaining wall project), nor the fact that I was going to have to trim all the pickets and posts to new lengths, or buy new 2 x 3 for rails, and stain those too…….
Nope it was when I was picking up the nails I had knocked out of those boards.
You see, many a summer day my brothers and I spent hours sitting hammer in one hand, bent nail in the other on the sidewalk out in front of our house with a coffee can of bent nails on our left, and a coffee can of “straightened” nails on our right and an old brick or piece of concrete, or just the surface of the sidewalk as our anvil.
We were handling one of the many chores that Dad left us every summer morning in misspent hopes of keeping us busy enough to not round up rattlesnakes, mess with the Catholic Priests, or tie up any more babysitters.
And truth be told there is a skill involved in straightening out a bent nail so as to make it usable again….To this day I am not sure what value that skill holds, but its there. You can experience it for yourself, or you can trust me on this one.
And so after having generated a pile of some 250+ rusty nails at my feet in the area I had been nail pulling and gathering them up, I got to thinking about the proof of that whole nature versus nurture thing.
But you see, my son is already 38 and it’s too late for him to learn the skill of straightening nails (or at least straightening them for some “maybe day” project for me), so I faced a conundrum. Do I live up to the genetic pull to invest a couple hours straightening out nails so they don’t “go to waste”? Or do I simply throw them out?
And while I am not entirely proud of the fact that I chose to go buy new screws to put the fence together with, I console myself with knowing that by tossing those things in the garden I’ll be saving on Iron amendment for several years and so I can still claim to be living up to the Dutchman in me.
© Copyright 2020 Marty K Vandermolen, All rights Reserved
No comments:
Post a Comment