The Gypsy Wagon

It was a Thanksgiving weekend to be remembered.

The family gathered at the house on Wednesday and Thursday morning. The little grandchildren came racing in…coughing and sneezing. They pick up the latest fads and fancies at school…and the latest germs too.

The French say visits from grandchildren follow a pattern — ‘ah’…and then ‘ouf’. Grandparents are delighted to see them arrive. Later, exhausted, they are delighted to see them leave.

It’s not a good idea to leave children and grandchildren, in-laws, friends, and friends of friends sitting in an enclosed space together for too long. The conversation is bound to take a wrong turn. Trump, COVID, Ukraine, Paul Pelosi, wokeism, sexism, racism, or one of dozens of other isms, not to mention the discipline, or lack thereof, of the children present…

…there are plenty of subjects that could cause trouble.

It was partly to head off conversation, and partly for his own amusement, that your editor had prepared an activity. Each year, he aims to focus attention on a particular farm project. One year, he replaced a barn roof. Another Thanksgiving ended with cords of firewood stacked up to the eaves.

This year’s project was building a gypsy wagon.

The right angles

Hardly had we begun than we began to feel suspicious of gypsies. What was the matter with them? What did they have against right angles?

Still, as a family project, the gypsy wagon worked marvellously well. One son and two sons-in-law worked together on it and seemed to enjoy the work. And the grandchildren, too, had fun climbing up and down onto the wagon…and playing with the power tools when we weren’t looking.

Dorothy, especially, was helpful. The six-year-old handed her grandfather tools and then checked his measurements. Her little tape measure, however, had come from Ireland. So, while grandad measured in feet and inches, Dorothy went metric.

Meanwhile, the kitchen was a hubbub of activity. A Thanksgiving meal is a major enterprise. Pots and pans — laying neglected in a cupboard for an entire year — were pulled out and put to use. Every surface was covered with sauces, potatoes, leeks, chestnuts, and, of course, a turkey that looked like it had been crossed with an ostrich.

Women dominate the kitchen — at least, in our household. Thanksgiving is, after all, a feast. They hustle about. They bustle. They exchange information, each with her own recipes, techniques, and habits. One works in a spotless kitchen at home. Another is a carefree cook. To an outside observer, the kitchen is a pandemonium of sights, smells, sounds, and chatter. But somehow, the women — old and young — come together and synchronise their efforts to prepare a masterpiece dinner.

It was into this bedlam that little Dorothy came with a message.

‘Grandma, can I tell you something?’

‘Not now honey, I’m just putting this in the oven…in a few minutes.’

Dorothy went back out to the gypsy wagon, where her father and grandfather were finishing the roof struts.

Of sturdy stuff

The key to the gypsy wagon is the frame. In this, we were lucky. We have kept an old four-wheel hay wagon in inventory for half a century. It was parked in a barn and used only as a place to pile unused lumber and old tools. Miraculously, the rubber tyres only needed to be reflated…and it could be pulled out in the open.

The platform of the wagon is made of sturdy oak, as were the cross beams. We simply removed about a foot from each side, reducing the width from eight to six feet.

But perhaps we should answer some questions. We will deal with the ‘why?’ first.

‘Why do you want a gypsy wagon?’ asked a friend.

‘Well, it’s a handy thing to have. You can use it for an emergency bedroom…or a quiet place to work.’

We didn’t mention that it might be useful at future Thanksgivings…as a refuge from the convivial joy of the occasion.

‘Also, if you do it right, it’s a nice thing to look at…like a lawn folly that you can move around for a change of scenery.’

Our farm is an old tobacco farm, where no tobacco has been planted for at least 40 years. It’s on the spine of Anne Arundel County and drifts down to the low tidewater area near the bay. (We are privately hoping that global warming raises the sea level so that we can keep a boat in front of the house.)

Out across the fields behind the house, where the flat land begins to dip toward the bay, is an ideal spot for a picnic. The perch, with its commanding view, must have attracted Indian tribes as well as early settlers. There, we find arrowheads from the former and bits of broken brick and pottery from the latter. On a clear day, sometime in the future, we will sit on the steps of the gypsy wagon and see the Chesapeake sparkling in the distance.

After about 15 minutes, Dorothy ventured into the kitchen again.

‘Grandma, can I tell you something?’

‘Sweety, I’ve just got to get these chestnuts peeled. Let’s talk later.’

Back at the gypsy wagon, the ‘how?’ questions came next; as in, ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’.

The answer was, alas, right in front of us. The rounded roof struts, cut with a jigsaw, wandered up and down like a bad haircut. The side walls, meant to lean out from the base at about an 80-degree angle, seem to have had ideas of their own. And the old plywood, recycled from a torn-down barn, looks unworthy of a genuine gypsy wagon.

‘This is a homemade gypsy wagon,’ explained a son, ‘made by gypsies who tell fortunes and steal puppies. Not carpenter gypsies.’

‘Is that a form of hate speech?’ asked a visitor.

‘I think it was a joke,’ we interrupted.

‘Yeah, well…gypsies are always victims of discrimination. We have to be careful how we joke about them.’

The culture wars are hard to avoid. Even on the jobsite, there is always a risk of ambush.

That conversation went no further.

After a few minutes more, Dorothy headed back to the kitchen, and repeated her message.

‘Grandma, can I tell you something?’

‘Sure…tell me.’

‘Grandad fell off the wagon and broke his leg.’

Regards,

Bill Bonner,
For The Daily Reckoning Australia

PS: Grandad did not really fall off the wagon or break his leg. But Dorothy thought it would be funny if he did.