December 27, 2019
Twenty-five years ago we still lived in the jungles of central Bolivia. Usually, upon needing a break in our daily routine and wanting a change from the hot steamy weather, we headed out to the highland city of Cochabamba.
In those days, the city was in great transition, it’s limits expanding daily as country folk moved in seeking a better life. Cocaine was the catalyst for much of the growth. Many people had new found riches, and it became fasionable to flaunt that wealth by buying land and building a big house with a high wall around it. Whole neighborhoods, once filled with the squalor of people living in shacks made from boards, tin, cardboard and whatever else they could find to keep the weather out, were replaced with the mansions of the new elite.
Sadly, in the rush to modernization, many of the old country manors and hacienda houses were also demolished. These houses and outbuildings had been built in colonial days. Though constructed with adobe, sun dried mud blocks, they had stood proudly for 200 years or more.
Another phenomenon of those days was the burgeoning secondhand trade, selling junk or antiques, your choice! These businesses were filled with the salvage of the old houses. There were hand carved doors and windows, old furniture, antique swords and guns and the junk of a thousand outbuildings. All was for sale!
It was in one such store that I found these old stirrups. They were not a matched pair as one had a square toe and the other a round one, but they were close. They were carved out of wood and the iron that wrapped around them, on which the leather of the saddle was buckled, was cut with a design and filled with silver. I believed they were made and used in the colonial era of Bolivia.
I thought they were beautiful and bought them to give to JJ, my wife, as a birthday present. She had a horse as a kid and had always had an affinity for all things equestrian. I made them into bookends to give them some purpose other than collecting dust. Besides, I was afraid that she might demand a horse and saddle on which to hang them and show them off in that way. Bookends were a lot more practical, I thought.
I write all this to bring you to the here and now. After our living room remodel, as we began to find a place for all our treasures, I found the jungle wood I used to make the bookends was badly cracked. I decided to replace it with walnut. Again, I’m amazed at the practicality of that long ago decision, sturrips instead of a stallion! It was so much less of a hassle to replace the cracked wood with new than if I had to build a new correl for the horse she still wants.
Writings By Phil 
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