What did you do with that telephone pole?

by Pat Laster

             An earlier column about the old telephone pole from the electric company that replaced all poles in this community, elicited one challenge and one suggestion.
            The challenge was from my uncle Norval in Oak Ridge: “I’m interested in learning how you’re going to use a power pole.”
           The suggestion was from poet Jeanie Carter from Hot Springs: paint a haiku on it with phosphorescent paint.
          Once, I saw Boots-the-cat use it as a scratching post.
           Instead of Mother’s Day gifts, I asked my children for another Saturday workday here at Couchwood. Due to my previous plans it had to be the following weekend.
           On Mother’s Day, while visiting, son Eric (Hot Springs, highway department employee) and Kid Billy-- with the help of a hammer and screw driver-- pulled the grounding wire through the iron staples holding it. And then removed the staples from the pole.
           On Thursday, like the woman who cleans before the cleaning lady comes, I worked in the yard dismantling a year-old smallish brush pile of sawbriars, sassafras and privet. The kids were coming over to help me do things I couldn’t do (very well) alone—cut a low pecan tree limb, clean the gutters, saw up the telephone pole…
            On the appointed day I came awake at 6:20. Pulling on my summer robe, I went to retrieve the papers. Lo and behold, there was Eric already bent over the pole.
           “I’m used to getting up at 5,” he said, after I oohed and aahed about how early it was. “Besides, it’s gonna get hot later.”
             Newspapers in hand, I hurried back in, rapped on Kid Billy’s door and told him Eric was here. “Already?” he asked. We both dressed and joined Eric by the pole. But that wasn’t the first thing on the agenda.
             Even before that, and after one neighbor was seen up and out, Eric took the leaf blower with a looooong cord to the attic and opened a north window.
             “Plug it into the wall, not the strip,” he directed (I knew that). Out the window he went and blew out the screened gutters all around the house. Oh, the clumps of oak tassels that blew off. Roofing granules scuttled to the downspouts and out.
            The next task was cutting the lowest limb of an old pecan tree close to the west property line where the neighbors kept an immaculate lawn. The cut limb would mean detritus in their space, but only until KB and I could pull it around to the far side of our property to the brush pile. Then, with a leaf rake I groomed their yard.
             Daughter Jennifer and grandson Jake drove up mid-morning, just as Eric was marking (“Do you have a crayon?” I produced a grandmother-stash of crayons and he selected an orange.) the telephone pole into 12, 14, and 16-inch segments.
             Chainsaw at the ready, Eric said, “It won’t be like cutting butter.” Soon, 28 pieces of pole lay like sliced carrots on a cutting board. I had decided to use them as property delineation on the south, where, at some earlier time, part of the concrete-block “fence” had ceased to be.
             Eric and Billy loaded the pieces of the pole into his truck and drove around the back of the house down to the old tennis court, making sure to avoid the horseshoe stakes. Unloaded, the pieces were then put in place by Jennifer, Billy and myself. Quite a neat-looking barrier.
            As soon as I can, I’ll post pictures.

c 2012 Pat Laster dba lovepat press