Belts and birds

This weekend is the Badger Steam and Gas Engine Club show -- antique tractors and steam-driven engines, flea market, fund-raising food booths for the schools and other organizations, shingle mill, antique cars -- swimming pools! Movie stars! Well, not so much the pools and the stars, but you get my drift.

Tom likes to look at the tractors and fantasize that he will find the Farmall model that they used on the farm when he was growing up here. I like to walk through the flea market. It is the only one I know where you can buy old books, jewelry or a full-size front-end loader. This is where I found Ted's Texas centenary spoon last year as well as the Russian icon egg I gave Angie and Justin.

Tom didn't buy a tractor, but he was on the lookout for a belt and found a guy doing beautiful handtooled belts, many with tractor names on the back. So he got a Farmall belt, if not a Farmall. He got another belt, too, nicely tooled but without an advertisement on it.

I found a small handcarved blackbird on sale for a couple of bucks. I have been looking for one -- to resonate with the chough's on the Welsh version of the Dodd coat of arms and also with Sam Houston's raven and Elijah's ravens, important to the Carmelites. This is not really a raven, and in the midwest, it is certainly not a Cornish choug, the member of the crow family pictured on the crest -- I know they look like smudges when it's this small. But a blackbird is close enough and the price was right.

(It's pronounced chuff.)