My brothers, brothers of mine.

I had this one day, that was just…really good. I was feeling good, you know? I was working on a really fun project, it was perfect, beautiful weather, and I was feeling the spark of creativity. I had gotten up early, eaten a bowl of oatmeal, worked out, and walked up through the Portal, to the bike shed on the edge of the farm. I got my bike out, and hit the road, it was probably 7:30 AM.

It was a really beautiful morning, rolling down the road with the cool morning breeze in my face. And holy shit, boys, I know I’ve prolly already told y’all this, but ride a fucking bike, for real. It’s like a little taste of my childhood, every single time. Like I’m ten years old again.

There’s a little Christian Coffee Shop(pe?) on the way into town, and I decided to stop there and get a cup of coffee.¹ I drink coffee only about once a month nowadays, so it’s really a treat!

I was working on building this big pump², and we can’t run a welder off the solar panels, so I had been working on it up at the house in town, which is about a mile from the edge of the farm. In the driveway in front of the garage.

(None of this really matters, of course; it’s just backstory. I’m trying to set the stage, paint a picture. Write a mother Firkin book, or something.)

Anyways.

The last thing I needed to do before I could test the pump was build an idler pulley to tension the two-hundred-and-nine inch belt that drives this thing. I had built the arm, pivot, and pulley assembly, I just needed a spring to tension it.

There’s a little hardware store in town, and they carry a variety of springs of different lengths and tensions. Here comes the important part.

Now, this house is really only about a half a mile from the hardware store, as the Ian walks.  The backyard is quite big, and at one end of it is a woods, with a shed and a bunch of old stuff that farmers never throw away back there. Cue photographs.

The house in town backs up to a pine forest Weyers Cavelike, which runs along the railroad tracks, backed by these long, industrial warehouses.

You can walk through the woods down this little trail that follows the fence line along the warehouses.

This trail winds through woods, past a little hut that the kids made…

Did I mention that these woods are owned by the railroad? So eventually, you come out right on the train tracks!

If you cross the tracks, you climb over a little rise, and back into the woods. Walk through a few more trees, and you come out…

In the parking lot behind the hardware store.

I walked around and went inside. The hardware store here carries a pretty wide assortment of springs, and I was able to find one that I thought would work.³. I headed back around the building, across the tracks, and through woods towards the house.

I almost said, “home,” and that’s what it feels like it should be. It was a special enough kind of day, and put me so much in mind of you, that I knew that I had to take these pictures, and later, to write these words. I just wanted to tell you all about it.

<3

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