Many English words hold more than one meaning. Post is one of them that sets my mind to wandering. Whenever I place a new entry on this website, it is called a post. It's my experience with posts on the farm that I'm drawn to, though, for this post.
On any livestock farm, miles of fence surround pastureland and further sub-divide larger acreage with line fences. We always had piles of wooden posts, steel posts, and electric posts on hand to patch fence or replace those broken. Our ground was level which made wire easy to stretch and hang on posts. When traveling around this country, I'm quick to notice those fences running through wet bogs, deep gullies, and thick forests where I recognize the extra work it takes to build and maintain them.
I remember building fence around grassland on muggy, mosquito-thick days. If I'd be at work fastening wire to posts, Dad would work ahead setting steel posts with a weighted driver. The sound of that tool striking the post in that thick air always arrived after I saw it strike. It is an image from long ago I've not forgotten.
Those summers I worked on a harvesting crew took me through country that used a different kind of post. Fences around Russell, Kansas were set in place with stone posts. Sandstone formations in that area yielded the material which I believe they cut with saws. I was told they had been standing there a long time, a fact I thought was a testament to early settlers' ingenuity.
A final story about posts features my Grandpa Charles Bueling as told to me by my Dad. Grandpa was a good horseman who knew how to break a team for work. It seemed one day he took a young team to the field to do some job. They spooked. One of them got across a fence line, and with one on either side, they ran along breaking posts off before he got them stopped. Dad said it was a new fence, too, and that Grandpa sure was mad.
