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They were bundled with a rubber band that had gone brittle and snapped the moment I picked them up, seven wooden yardsticks of different lengths and widths, most advertising a hardware store or a lumber company whose names I did not recognize, printed in faded red and black along one edge. The swap meet ran two mornings a month in a parking lot outside town, mostly furniture flippers and people clearing out garages, and the yardsticks were on a folding table with a coffee can full of loose nails and a stack of paint-splattered drop cloths, priced at a dollar for the whole bundle since the rubber band had clearly been holding the deal together in the seller’s mind, not the yardsticks’ actual value.
I gave the man a dollar and carried them to my car loose in my arms since I had nothing to rebundle them with, feeling a little ridiculous walking through a parking lot holding seven wooden sticks like a broom salesman.
Reading what was printed on them
Once I got them home and laid them out on the dining table, I spent longer than I expected just reading the printing along each one. A feed store, a lumber yard, a hardware store, all with local phone numbers that were five digits instead of ten, which tells you something about how long ago these were given away free with a purchase, back when a yardstick was a promotional item rather than a thing you would ever pay for on its own. One had almost no printing left at all, worn down to a ghost of red at one end and nothing at the rest, clearly the oldest or the most used of the seven.
Two were slightly warped, bowing just enough that they would not lie flat on the table, which happens to wood that has spent time somewhere with real humidity swings, a garage or a barn probably, expanding and contracting over enough seasons that the grain gives up trying to stay straight. I did not try to flatten those. Wood that has warped that gradually, over that much time, tends to crack if you try to force it back with clamps or weight, and a straight yardstick was never really the point of keeping them anyway.
Cleaning printed wood without losing the print
The grime on all seven was mostly just handling dirt, decades of hands and pockets and toolbox drawers, and it came off easily with a barely damp cloth, no soap, working along the grain rather than across it. The printing worried me more than the dirt did, since it is stamped or printed rather than painted on most vintage yardsticks, a shallow ink that sits right at the surface of the wood and can lift if you scrub too hard or use anything with any real moisture in it.
I tested on the least legible one first, the one with the ghost printing, since I had the least to lose there, and found that a completely dry microfiber cloth actually did more good than a damp one, lifting surface dust without touching the ink at all. For the rest I used dry cloth first and only reached for a damp one on spots that the dry cloth could not manage, mostly at the very ends where the wood had picked up a darker, oilier grime from being handled at the tips.
What seven yardsticks are actually for
They do not measure anything in my house. I want to be honest about that, since it would be easy to write about restoring old tools and pretend they went back into service, but a warped, sixty year old yardstick with faded advertising is not a tool I reach for when I actually need to measure a shelf. I use a tape measure for that, same as anyone.
What they do instead is lean against the wall in the mudroom, propped in the corner behind the umbrella stand, seven different lengths and colors of old advertising leaning together in a way that looks, I think, like exactly what it is: a small collection of things that used to be given away for free and are now just interesting to look at. My favorite is still the one with almost no printing left, since it asks the most of anyone looking at it, no store name to explain it, just a plain strip of old wood that has clearly been somewhere and done something, even if I will never know what.
I think about the man at the folding table sometimes, whether he knew what he had beyond a bundle taking up space, whether the rubber band snapping in my hands the moment I picked them up was the last thing holding that particular collection together as an idea. It is mine now, loosely, propped in a corner rather than bundled tight, which feels like the right way to keep something that was never meant to be kept in the first place.
