What IS That?

We spent much of the day today with a consultant talking about taking our office paperless. That is a topic that will no doubt generate some posts over the next months, as it is an exciting, yet scary prospect. But upon returning to our office from lunch, the consultant looked up at the pipe in the pine tree and said what everyone says when they first see it: What IS that?

The answer is that way back in the day when Grandma lived in the home that is now our office, next to the SMALL pine tree was a wood shed. The Mister added that Grandma had never "taken him to the wood shed" because he was a grandchild, not a child, and everyone knows that grandchildren are for spoiling, not paddling. Next to the wood shed was a clothesline, metal pipes set in the ground, with lines strung between them. Many years later, when the wood shed came down, with the clothesline following shortly after, the cross bar of the clothesline had become embedded in the tree as it grew. The Mister cut off the pipe, but he used a cutting torch to do it and didn't want to hurt the tree, so he left it the length that you see in the picture. The PVC cap was added so that no one cracked their head on it walking by; and now it's a conversation piece.

Update on Saturday morning: The Mister and I happened to see a clothesline pole in all its original glory at a farm employee house, so we thought we'd share that picture as well: