Wagon Wheel in the Snow

Wandering through Brimfield (Massachusetts) during the Brimfield Fair many years ago, Marash Martha (who had come East to visit Marash Girl AND to check out the antiques of Western Massachusetts), spied a wagon wheel -- "Stop!" she shouted. "That will be the  perfect top for the coffee table in my den in Texas." (Now who has a den large enough for a coffee table as large as a 19th century wagon wheel?  Only folks who live in Texas is Marash Girl's guess.)  At any rate, the two sisters screeched to a stop, or they stopped as Marash Martha shrieked, and Marash Martha, as she is wont to do, purchased the wheel of that long ago wagon and arranged to have it (the wheel, not the wagon which was nowhere to be seen) shipped to Texas post haste; once there, she arranged for the wagon wheel to be made into a glass topped coffee table for her den.  It was indeed magnificent, and fit the den perfectly.  That girl -- what an eye she has for design.  Thus when Marash Girl saw the wagon wheel pictured above sitting in the dumpster outside of her book storage facility, she grabbed it.  Not knowing what to do with it in her New England Victorian house, she decided to set it against the hand hewn stone wall of her basement, the foundation of her 19th Century house, a wall that was probably built at around the same time as the wagon wheel was rolling through the deserts of the wild west.  (How it got to the east coast of Massachusetts is a tale only the wheel can tell.) Now missing a spoke, there the wheel sits,  ladies and gentlemen, for all the world to see, for all the world  to wonder, for all the world to remember.