The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

entropy
ĕn′trə-pē
noun

A measure of the disorder or randomness in a closed system.

This past couple of weeks I’ve been cleaning up after the snowstorm that bent over small trees, broke huge limbs off the Doug Firs, toppled a couple of our sheds and collapsed old fences. And so naturally I’ve been mulling over, during hundreds of trips to the burn pile, the concept of entropy. I hear tell the entire universe as we know it is in constant decay, entropic, in other words. You probably don’t need an astrophysicist to tell you that, just wake up every morning with new aches and pains, all the more so when you’re cleaning up a few tons of storm debris and hauling it around the property.

Yesterday I deconstructed a kayak shelter that had crashed after the snowload tipped it off balance, admittedly a poor architectural design devoid of structural engineering stamp, but I guess I hadn’t anticipated snow that weighed as much as ice falling in a surprise attack pre-dawn. I managed to use the truck and ropes to pull the other kayak shed upright, then added extra supports for any future snowstorms. Right, fat chance the new design would be much better than the last. I took the disassembled parts of the old one and used those to build a cute little shelter for our roadside RUBY Airbnb rental, the one with the crabpot and a metal crab hauling itself up onto the sign. Course, you know and I do too, using old wood cuts into its longevity, but hellfire, I’m trying to embrace entropy, not fight it.

The storm came on the heels of a weeklong garden fencing project I’d just completed, the one to keep the varmints out and the vegetables hostage. The old fence was built nearly 30 years ago, a fancy geometrical cedar artwork complete with stained glass in the gates and arbors, now rotting away. What I could keep, I left. What could be repurposed, I repurposed. Some on the new fence’s gates, some to make artworks down by the road, and yeah, I know, they won’t last 30 years this time. So sue me….

In my old age I’m constantly reminded of this notion of perpetual decay and for the time being I keep reciting Dylan Thomas’s recommendation to rage against the dying of the light, not to much avail. Things fall apart, buildings fall down, fences rot and trees uproot. If I’d created the universe, I might have reversed all this, not really sure what the thinking was to make disorder the modus operandi of all things. And yeah, I know, not my call….

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