We keep a lot of scrap boards under the front porch, so PB began digging through them until he located a likely suspect for our project.
When he laid it out on the back porch to begin measuring where to cut it into 3' lenghts, he laughed and told me he knew exactly where this board had come from.
It was from when he built a frame on the back of his Chevy 1-ton pickup truck to move himself and his stuff to MN, to be with yours truly. This board was as old as our relationship, 10 years on August 12th.
The staples were still stuck in it where he had stapled the tarp down over his load. The staple+tarp system proved to be a bit less than ideal... thirty miles out of Sheridan, WY, we had to pull the truck over and head back into town to get more tarps and bungies, as the tarps had ripped out of the staples. It was, of course, freezing with blowing rain that night as we struggled with those tarps and bungies in the pitch black roadside off of I90.
That board now has a second life - it has been cut into two pieces needed to hold up the back porch.
Ten or twenty years from now, when the next owner of this old building rips up the back porch decking, they'll see some newer boards spliced onto the old beams. They probably won't notice the staples. And they will never know where this old board has been.
But we know. And it makes me smile knowing a little piece of our history is now holding up the back porch.
Cheers -
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