had been by his place recently, buying fresh eggs that Kelly offers for sale. “Used to just call them eggs,” he says. “Now I call ‘em Organic eggs,” he adds with an unmistakable serving of country-fried irony.When Carina ran in for the eggs, I snapped a couple of pictures of the turkey
that was hanging out near the front door.Kelly's got multiple-sclerosis. He gets around his farm with a little atv and around his shop with a wheelchair that has a joy-stick. Once we put the dozen fresh eggs in the car, we got to chatting, and pretty soon we were checking out his place
with him while he shared a few stories.He showed us a fireplace mantel that he’s working on, cut as a section from a very large and old juniper trunk. It was obviously a very old tree, old growth, hundreds of years old if not over a thousand years, by the look of the growth rings. Kelly had sanded it’s twisted trunk smooth,
and was preparing it for finishing, for a customer of his. Outside the shop there were a lot of large juniper trunks laying about, a couple of them had been sanded and oiled,
they looked like precious relics.Another of our stops was the corral where he keeps his pet buffalo,
John Wayne. Kelly harvests some of John’s wool to sell to local spinners.
He says he’s raised little Johnny from a baby, and told how the buffalo’s mama had rejected it, and Kelly raised it with bottle feeding, every two hours in the beginning. When Kelly went into the corral with his atv, the buffalo came running and prancing with him like a happy puppy. At this moment little John weighs in around a thousand pounds. Kelly says his size and weight will double.On the way out, we stopped by the shop again to check out a buckeye burl table
that Kelly made. He’s got some pretty amazing stock of mostly maple and juniper, also some madrone. Quite a beautiful place, if you’re headed east out of Bend, Oregon on highway 20, you should stop in. Kelly Mayfield is a real friendly guy, and don’t forget: organic eggs. There's a sign on the right.
