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Meeting Place

It is a fine, old mesquite door, aged to gray by relentless sun, as solid and heavy as it ever was.  The hand-crafted spikes dot the surface.  The hinges are still there, as is the post the hinges are attached to.  Even the lock remains, hammered down into place with another hand-made nail I salvaged from our log house in Iowa.

It rests horizontally, now, on two dish pack boxes; just testing how it might be to make a credenza with the old door as the top.  Just to make sure that it will be able to do the job, I placed a Dean Schwarz plate, with a running horse, on top.  It might not be the first horse the old door has seen, or supported.

I wonder, sometimes, why it is that I do not want ordinary furniture, but am drawn, instead, to using something that once was something else.  For decades, I have looked at things and thought, "That could be used for. . . ."  It has nothing to do with being frugal, or saving the resources of the planet, or a Green Movement.

I think it has to do with what strikes me as being beautiful.  That old door is beautiful!  It does not matter much whether anyone else thinks it is beautiful.  It is just that I like the almost iron-toughness of the Mesquite, and how it has become gray, enduring the seasons.  One can almost see the people who took new mesquite and chiseled it into shape, and then drove even harder iron spikes into place, bending them over on the other side, locking the tree into a duty the tree had never known.  Those workmen had an eye for beauty, too.  Such a door cannot have been made by men who were concerned only with utility.  They knew they were creating a beautiful door; an enduring door; a door to top a credenza someday.  A door to hold a running horse; a fire-hardened horse.

There, where a Mexican craftsman, and an Iowa carpenter's square nail, and a Potter's horse have come to meet.

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