Veronika
Sung to the Tune of Veronica by Elvis Costello
Hello Friends,
I live in an old house. Built in the mid-1800s, its style is colonial that flirts with Victorian. It has small rooms, a central chimney with 4 defunct fireplaces, and two staircases that were hastily installed as afterthoughts. It also has thick wainscoting, odd pine and oak wood flooring scattered throughout, and elaborate trim around most windows and doors.
A couple of decades ago, I bought this house as a home for myself and my two boys. I saw its need for renovation as a personal project.
The entire house showed signs of partial, misguided restoration, and had been mostly ignored and desperately demanded some TLC. Being one of the few properties I could afford in the area and hoping to build a life here, I took it on.
The first thing I did (besides rip out all the carpet and redo what hardwood floors could be salvaged) was replace the dilapidated shed with a new one (my Dad actually did that—you just try to stop him): I needed a good, sturdy place to store the tools I would require to fix up the joint.
In the ensuing years, I have brought half the house down to the studs, rebuilt the kitchen and laundry room, added a full bath, updated the wiring, installed solar, replaced the gas burner and hot water system, and made dozens of smaller alterations.
To be completely honest, I’m not a general contractor, so I had help with the things that a person should have help with in order to keep their family safe. Those pros have way better tools than I do and know how to use them. But I did and continue to do myself as much as the state of Massachusetts and my town lets me—in fact, the town inspector saved my butt more than once. Thank you for that.
None of what I have done so far could have been accomplished without tools. We have become so used to having apparatus in our lives that we often forget that most of our activities require tools. Yet, we are among the very few beings on this planet that can (or has figured out how to) use tools.
Well, now that number has gone up by one—meet Veronika, the back-scratching cow: “Veronika is a 13-year-old Swiss Brown cow that is not farmed for meat or milk. She belongs to organic farmer and baker Witgar Wiegele as a companion.”
https://cdn.jwplayer.com/previews/7y1PcYlS
[Jan Langbein, an applied ethologist at the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology] says. “I’m fully convinced that this is an outstanding example of tool use in cattle.”—https://www.science.org/content/article/no-bull-austrian-cow-has-learned-use-tools
All I can say is, “Thank God that thing isn’t loaded.”
Imagine if cows wanted to do more than scratch their backs? Consider all the shit we’ve done to cows over the years. Haunting.
One could (and I actually don’t know that anyone hasn’t) argue that tools and tool use enabled human evolution. I mean, once we figured out that our opposable thumbs were handy (pun intended?), we started making tools to assist us with everything.
Almost to a fault—how many different types of hammers are there? How many similar kitchen gadgets? How many hairdryers, flashlights, paintbrushes?
We got so many tools that we need many huge stores to provide them: Lowe’s, Home Depot, Ace Hardware, Harbor Freight, just to name a tiny percentage. And those are just the “tool” tools like the ones I have squeezed into my shed.
If you were to go into my shed, you’d also see many “useless” tools. I have a manual log splitter. No, not an ax (I have 3 of those). It’s a device with cranks that pushes logs towards a blade and slowly, effortfully creates 2 pieces. When I use it, I look like a demonstration model from a late-night exercise infomercial. The pounds just melt away.
The funny thing is that I don’t burn firewood (anymore), having replaced my smokeless pit with a lazy-man’s gas thingy that is a cinch to turn on and off.
I have clam digger claws. It looks like a rake, but it has longer tines that are at a 90-degree angle, like a hoe. I don’t dig clams. I hardly eat clams. It was chattel I inherited when I bought this house, along with an ice hook. And that’s not used because no one has delivered ice in like a century.
And my old house continues giving, like the underwear that was used for insulation when I pulled a wall down to remodel my kitchen. Tighty-whities stuffed behind a wall of horsehair plaster, keeping this home’s inhabitants warm through the years.
We’re an inventive sort, we tool-wielding beings. And now we can add one more to our ranks.
The next time you use your car keys to slice open a package or pick your teeth with a business card, consider Veronika, who went years with itchy skin before she made the evolutionary leap to using a mop handle to scratch her own ass.
We need to watch out, though. Tool use breeds mayhem, like this squirrel that used a broom to fake its own death:
Happy reading and happy writing,
David