Hi Leland,  I'll answer your ? first.  We have LOTS of snow, about 2 feet
of "old" snow and a bit of new with it still coming down.  We got mostly
rain this time around but just a few miles north it is all snow.  Hope we
get to sugarin' season right soon though.  My brother has only boiled once
and made about 20 gallons--'nuf for one good pancake as the old timer used
to say.

Now to get to the real subject at hand.  As I understand the
"Constitution,"  "Old Ironsides" is a ship from the Revolutionary War.  It
is very old and has had to be repaired many times.  I would presume that
when it is repaired new material has to be used to replace rotten or worn
out material.  At what point does this ship cease to be "Old Ironsides,"
Revolutionary War battleship, and become a replica?  Yup, we do ax a lot of
?  Ruth





At 6:04 PM -0500 3/22/01, Leland Torrence wrote:
>Ruth,
>    I first heard that story when I was a kid.  It was told as a joke and
>the point was that it made fun of the guy who kept saying "they don't make
>anything like they used to".  Just like the fabled "good olde times".  We
>have all read old and ancient accounts of people complaining about the
>manners of children and the difficulty of finding good help.
>    Now as for authenticity of the axe.  There is something special about
>the connectedness of the item and the original hand that used it.  We can
>assume at no time was the handle and the head replaced at the same time.  It
>remained in constant use.  It has integrity as an old friend, but it is not
>authentic in as much as its parts are not original.  Now if the same forger
>made the head and the owner fashioned the ash handle from a local forrest...
>the process is authentic:  the axe is authentically made.
>    But why all the semantics?  Isn't it easy just to say:  "Hezzy has had
>that axe for sixty five years.  He loves that thing cause it looks just like
>the original one.  Course, nobody has the heart to tell him the Japanese
>bought that company in Spiller's Falls."
>Ruth, you country fellers ax alot of questions.  How much snow ya got up
>there?
>Best,
>Leland
--
Ruth Barton
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Westminster, VT
Remember in November