Today's tool is probably either the first, or the second, tool an anthropoid ever used. It's a stick.
I guess it's four years now that we've been heating our house with wood. Got our nice, efficient fireplace insert, got cords and cords of wood from the trees that were crowding the house, and we had piles of kindling from the remodeling and upgrading that we've done--lots of lath and pulled-up floorboards and subflooring. What we did not have was a fireplace set: a nice poker, an ash shovel, maybe some tongs. But, you make do with what's at hand, and what was at hand was a one-foot-long section of rough-cut subflooring that had been busted up to make a piece of kindling. And, because it did, we kept making do--it got more and more charred (or perhaps fire-hardened), the "handle" end became more and more polished, and at one point last year a chunk split off of it. Still worked, though.
Well, we finally got ourselves a fireplace set. It's nice, and it actually works significantly better than the stick. But I haven't had the heart to burn it yet. It's just sitting by the fireplace, behind the "real" set, and occasionally, when I'm building the fire, I grab it instead of the iron poker, without thinking. Some primitive, atavistic streak, I guess, "Mmmggggg, Thag poke fire with stick!"
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