Tread on me. Make my day.

Armory

Cold steel with jagged teeth awaits any intruder at the raccoon headquarters, which is also our hallowed home:

At the bedside-ready is - not a shotgun, not an Uzi, not an AK-47. A warning to any malicious readers into whose eyesight these presents may come:

You do not want to come here uninvited.

This device, for self-protection only, hasn't been used for years since the advent of the chain saw. In its original form it was a two-man lumberjack saw. We salvaged it from a shed near Pembine WI, thinking something could be made from it someday.

That 'something someday' came about 20 years ago when we took the nasty-looking length of steel and fashioned it into a formidable sword, using our ocy-acetylene cutting torch. It is now a 33" detterent. The handle is a sapling tree that we found, eroded from the shore of Lake Michigan. It is pretty, with the roots cut off and sanded with a belt-sander. The former root-ball is at the end of the handle.

We brazed a steel hilt onto the modified blade and buried the extension into the wood. We epoxied it solidly and deeply into the handle after grinding down the rough metal edges.

As we were doing the grinding and the sparks were flying, Joe the Lawnist , our neighbor next door, walked down his driveway next to ours and called to us in the garage, "Whutcha doin' dere, Dave?"

Taking the sword out of the machinist's vise, I said, "Here, let me show you." Approaching him on my side of the peony bed that separated his lot from ours, I said, "Watch."

I took a v-e-r-y s-l-o-w swipe at the blooms and easily lopped off several of them. The legendary "One-fell-swoop." Gathering them up I said, "For the kitchen table, Joe. Here, have some yourself."

Joe, visibly impressed, said, "Sheesh, Dave, dat's one wickit ting ya got dere!" Now dead, Joe never did try to break into our house.

Not that he ever would have.

We mention this anecdote because our friend in eastern Ohio, Stew, who lives on an abandoned coal mine in a trailer, having reclaimed over the years the now beautiful but once scarred strip mine, sounds like an interesting mix of personhood. He wrote to us again yesterday.

Stew was a "Redneck for Obama", a Marine, a steam-fitter, and a reborn pacifist, who likes, he says, to throw knives and tomahawks for relaxation.

He thought it might be incongruous for me - we've never actually met - to understand his interest in weaponry given his peacenik stance.

"No, we get it," we said, and sent the above picture.