Wood Working Projects, Fidelity
Hints of green slowly coming up from the ground. Spring is knocking at the door. I have a long list of spring projects to tackle, but Amy reminded me that before I move on to spring projects, I need to get all the winter “honey-do” jobs done. A trip to town for lumber. Then extra time throughout the week was spent in the garage trying to build shoe shelves and storage bins for our muck room. Our muck room has turned to a catch-all for shoes, coats, hats, and gloves. Hopefully this will help organize the clutter.
Hasten was especially proud of his contribution to the finished products. At first he wasn’t very eager to help, but the more the pieces began to come together and take shape, the more excited he got. He was in awe of taking plain boards and being able to turn it into something, and he was proud to have participated in the transformation. “This is the best thing you’ve ever built Dad! Way better than chicken shelters.” Ha.
Wood working in the garage has become somewhat of a norm for this time of year. In years past I’ve spent this season building chicken shelters. We built our first three chicken shelters right at seven years ago and moved our very fist batch of meat birds throughout our front yard. In the years following we kept building more and more chicken shelters. We now have 22 shelters which is enough for me.
It was in the garage seven years ago building a backyard chicken coop for our first group of egg layers that I ran a couple fingers through the table saw. As I was getting the table saw back out this week I told Wren that this was the saw that cut off the end of my finger. Her response, “Oh… that’s cool.” Ha. Real cool.
Amy and the kids delivered meat to Knoxville early in the week. I kept up with the cows, pigs, and chickens.
In Wendell Berry’s Port William stories, Burley Coulter’s character has been a pillar of the community. Berry’s short story “Fidelity” is about Burley’s death. Though we know that death is an inevitable part of life, as a society we continue to run from it as though we may somehow escape its grip. Accepting death, let alone embracing it, is hard. In Burley’s last days his body was old and worn out, as I hope mine will grow to be one day. His family, obviously caring for Burley and not wanting to lose him, took him to the hospital. The hospital succeeded in delaying his death, but it don’t not succeed in giving him life. His life belonged to his home and his farm. His death belonged there too. So one night his son, Danny, takes Burley from the hospital to let him die where he belonged.
“By both principle and necessity, he had never owned a new motor vehicle in his life. The present pickup was a third-hand dodge which Burley had liked to describe as, ‘a loose association of semi-retired parts, like me.’”
“Loving him, wanting to help him, they had given him over to the best of modern medical care, which meant as they now saw that they had abandoned him.”
“Danny never had belonged much to the modern world and every year he appeared to belong to it less. Of them all, Danny most clearly saw the world as his enemy, as their enemy, and most forthrightly and cheerfully repudiated it. He reserved his allegiance to his friends and his place.”
“It made her fearful, and it made her unafraid. Like the others, she had mourned her uselessness to Burley in his sickness. Like the others, she had been persuaded and had helped to persuade that they should get help for him. Like the others, once they had given him into the power of the doctors and into the sterile hard light of that way and place in which he did not belong, she had wanted him back. And she had held him to her in her thoughts, loving the old failed flesh and bone of him as never before, as if she could feel in thought, in nerve, and through all intervening time and distance the little helpless child that he had been and had become again. Knowing now that he was with Danny, hidden away somewhere at home, joy shook her, and the window blurred in her sight.”
“In the hospital, Burley’s body had seemed to Danny to be off in another world. He had not been able to rid himself of the feeling that he was looking at it through a lens or a window. Here, the old body seemed to belong to this world absolutely. It was so accepting now of all that had come to it, even its death.”
Have a good week.
Will