Prepare a Table

Golly, the prices on nice new redwood picnic tables that come in pieces and are properly drilled so I'd have a cat's chance of assembling them, and on state-park-quality weatherproof synthetic tables I could leave outside 365 (no longer eager to drag them into the garage every autumn); a chintzy plastic table, the only affordable kind, wouldn't last two years in our I-love-you-I-hate-you Missouri weather. But I'd like a table again beneath the twin oaks. I dismantled the old rotted one screw by screw, about two weeks ago.

Thought then to look up plans to build my own. There's a lot of wood in the garage, all sizes and shapes, much of it just fine, like 3 x 3 posts, and big sheets of pine and plywood, and hollow wooden closet doors, and braces, and other pieces I did target practice on, but most of them whole. It's been there unmoved for seven years. I hardly even saw it anymore. I'd need certain kinds of varnish, paint, power tools (with no electricity in the garage; I once refinished a door by flashlight). Demetrius bought the stack of weights in the photo, becoming for the first time in his life a crazed health nut when diagnosed with terminal cancer; he was so human. And he bought all the wood, too, because we were going to have a treehouse, and just because. This would have been my first carpentry project. Never handled a power saw in my life. Changed my mind. (My mind is my power saw.)

It occurred to me I could ask and pay someone to build a sturdy outdoor table using these available materials. So I did. It might get started as soon as next week.

Powered by Steam

This 12-inch-gauge steam railway gives half-hour, two-mile rides through the woods along the Meramec River, on Sundays May through October from 11 to 4. Pictured is just one of the several steam locomotives of the all-volunteer "Wabash Frisco & Pacific Railroad." Has a roundhouse, switches, a real railroad bridge, water tank, delights everybody including me who finally went for the first time today. There was a single seat left on the first train; as the rare single at this big-butt family thing, I got it. Have always adored trains and it used to be my preferred method of travel. (Grew up next to a railroad spur. I remember the manual seesaw handcars, remember seeing a worker who was fleetingly in my sight at dusk, oh, about 45 years ago.) The train's departure point is the vanished town of Glencoe; it travels also through the the sites of the lost Missouri towns of Bluffs, Mohan, and Yeatman.