Early in the morn here at the ranch. I am up buzzing on my steroids from yesterday’s treatment. Sometimes these are some of the best blogposts when I am “the life of the party” high. Things have been lean as of late with the weather uprising that we have been experiencing but hopefully we are on the back side now.

With all the freezing and thawing here locally, that movement has shaken a memory out of my brain. It is a memory of years ago with My Rebecca my new love in my life and my year at the U of Washington studying art metal casting. This was mid 1970’s with disco and those crazy flowery shirts. Nobody but nobody dressed in all black and stared into a cellphone all day but I digress.

The University kept us gnarly sculpture students out at the edge of the campus hidden out behind the baseball fields where no one would find us. I worked in the foundry where we were casting with aluminum, brass, bronze and iron. I am trying to remember but aluminum melts at 1200 degrees F, to bronze at 1800 to iron at 2200.

It was all very esoteric and at times scary. We had huge furnaces fired by natural gas and coke. We ran around in silver suits and the heat would blow our long hair back as we poured the molten fun.

And the finished pieces after weeks of work were exciting to view. We made those! And our pieces were durable as they were beautiful, good for two thousand years at least. Well that is the world that we lived in and it brought on a certain mindset or a certain way of thinking about the world around us.

And this last few weeks with all the freezing and melting of the water in our environment with the four storms that we endured, it shook loose memories of those days. We then moved through the freezing and thawing of metals as easily as we commonly move through the freezing and thawing of water. This movement between the physical forms of water we take for granted and that is with us in our shared knowledge. But we sculptors were privy to this world where all metals were basically “frozen” as most people normally experience them.

We were thawing scrap aluminum screen doors and making art. And brass plumbing faucets and making art. And scrap bronze from ships to make more art. And busting up old cast iron heating radiators to to put in a cupola with coke and forced air to raise it to 2200 degrees and make some more art. We were nuts concentrating on the art but the process made the world liquid for us. Things like cars, silverware and ships were just temporarily frozen and waiting for us to change them into something else and maybe something better. It was a swords to plowshares world.

And now after all these years I bang my knee on the step of my tractor Juliet and I instantly feel that it is pretty darn solid and immovable but there was a time…

More tomorrow.

Good one Felipé. Happy St Valentine’s Day! Love of course, Felipé.