I was looking over some of my artwork recently and noticed that besides my better known subject matter of cityscapes I have a fancy for fence posts. Well whats not to love about something old and weathered sitting out a field usually with some old rusty barbed wire nailed into it and maybe my favorite thing is how ranchers and farmers never seem to take out the old nails and just tack on some new ones so the posts can become littered with old nail and bits of old barbed wire. If the post has been there for a while then it is often times leaning to one side or another due to the ground giving way under it. Perhaps I'm a romantic but I look at them the way other people may view and old tractor or farm equipment sitting off to the side slowly rusting away having done its job long ago and is now just there for better or worse. I don't know if farmers are being nostalgic for leaving the old tractor sit there unwilling to let go of a beloved piece of equipment or are they being artistic knowing how other people love to see old farm equipment rusting in a field. Regardless of why farmers do what they do I enjoy finding fence posts doing or trying to do what they where put there for to do and that is to hold a line, to mark a boundary, to keep animals in an area. Here in the Mt. Diablo foot hills area where I do my walking there are areas for cattle to graze and since the area has hills and the rain can be heavy the ground can move or gets washed away which requires ranchers to go out and do fence maintenance. It brings me back to my childhood farm in central Pennsylvania. Fence maintenance was something that had to be done regularly. Back there it would usually be a branch falling on the fence that would nock it down and then the cows would escape and we would have to go find them and bring them back in and fix the fence. My walks here in the Mt. Diablo hills along the fences brings me back to those days on the farm.
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