Someone on marketplace was giving away a 60s credenza, walnut veneer, one leg busted. Free. I drove 40 minutes in the rain with a tarp and my brother's old ratchet straps still in the trunk, which I don't think about, they're just the straps.

Got there and the piece was worse than the photos, water damage all along the bottom, drawer fronts swollen shut. And I stood in this guy's driveway and realized I didn't want the credenza, I wanted the hardware. The little brass pulls, the keyhole escutcheons. So I asked if I could just take those instead of the whole thing and he looked at me like I'd asked to keep his dog.

Came home with eleven pulls and a keyhole plate in a ziploc. They're on the work table now. The credenza part of it, the actual furniture, I don't care about at all. I care that a stranger's hand turned these ten thousand times opening a drawer for a pair of scissors or a lighter or whatever was in there, and it polished the brass down to the base metal in one spot.

Probably going to end up gluing them to a panel and calling it a piece about small repeated gestures, which is a sentence I'd hate if someone else said it.

Anyway the house smells like old brass now.