That blue

There was a big event in Cherokee County last weekend. The Tahlequah City Dump had a free hazardous waste day. In anticipation, I went through all the buildings here gathering paint cans I wanted to get rid of.

First, I went through the red metal barn we built about ten years ago. There I found cans from fairly recent projects. Stain from wooden frames I’d built for Lost City Knits customers. Some remnants from my brief flirtation with woodturning.

Then I went to the green garage, which was standing when we bought the farm in 1973 and had for some decades before. Cans there went further back. An off the shelf can of “Doeskin” from Anchor which has, for half a century now, been the color of the farmhouse. I’d recently purchased two more cans of this shade to paint some replaced siding. Aluminum paint that covers the gates, and that I’d once, as a kid, slathered over a rock and shown to a friend back in town, convincing him a little to easily that I’d found silver.

Finally, I went to the pumphouse behind the farmhouse. As one might imagine it houses a pump, but the water produced from it isn’t good at all, and pales in comparison to the water from the wellhouse in the lower pasture. The pumphouse had become a catchall for too much junk over the years, and I’d recently backed up a trailer and hauled a load away. For this I didn’t wait for free dump day. I just paid the guy at the dump $10 on whatever day I wanted. The pumphouse was a repository of very old memories, most of them best forgotten.

Up on a top shelf, however, next to a dirt dauber nest, was a can of dark blue paint.

I remember the day my mother used it in 1973. She set up a painting station in front of the farmhouse to paint several bookcases and shelves. The insides of these cases were white, but the exterior and any shelves were this dark blue. My father had noted that she always liked painting, and that he didn’t. She took great care with the insides, a task that drove him to find a book to read instead. And then she did the outsides, which would have been faster as there was less surface. The boards that are the sides of these cabinets have a slight convex curvature. The intersection of blue and white at the edge of that curve is crisp.

Even at a young age I thought of her as somewhat regal, and although I had watched her clean house and do dishes before, watching her at this menial task seemed odd. But she was content with her brush.

She would die of breast cancer within two years of painting that day. I still have all of the cases, and one bookcase has, I think, been with me in every place I’ve lived.

As I crested the hill that leads to the entrance for the dump I was met with a line of trucks and trailers on the shoulder of the road, all in line for the free dump day. In the two hours I sat in line, I began to realize that many others were taking advantage of the “free” part of the day’s description, not the “hazardous material” part. A guy two trucks ahead had a used mattress and an old riding lawnmower on his trailer. I knew from experience that the metal recycling place half a mile back would give enough money for the mower to cover the cost of dropping off the mattress at the dump on any weekday with no waiting at all, and that I consider it a good day if I can make enough at metal recycling to offset my charge at the dump and also cover lunch, but we each get to choose how we go through life.

The trailer ahead of me contained, among other things, some cheap metal bookcases from the 1990s. They soon found a place next to that riding lawnmower in the dumpster for metal.

I left my paint cans, but not all of them. Might need that blue someday.