I call this a famous occurrence because it struck me funny. I laughed so hard I cried, and I'm afraid I've mentioned it whenever we've shopped for home supplies since. "Remember that time..." here I begin to dissolve into giggles, "...when we were shopping for kitchen cupboards and you kept saying..."
Poor Farmer John.
I've always thought it odd that this man who is an accomplished welder and mechanic seems so inept when it comes to carpentry. Whenever I've inquired about building a shelf or doing anything requiring nails, hammers, and wood, he has had a stock response. He stares at me, mouth partly open, with a crease between his brows. It is as though I'm speaking Greek. I have even felt sorry for him, thinking that it must be sad, having grown up around house builders and woodworkers as he did, not to share in their skills.
Fortunately, our son grew up to be a woodworker, and I've been able to turn to him when I've had need for someone to saw, build, or nail. But our son is married now, lives 45 minutes away, and has a busy life of his own.
A couple of weekends ago I was frantically preparing for company when the broken piece of trellis I'd propped along the ramp to my mother's apartment fell to the ground (our home has a "mother-in-law addition, where my 91-year-old Alzheimer's mom has lived for the past eleven years). I was brought to tears; it just looked horrid and I couldn't get it to stay in place. John happened to see me struggling with it and strolled up and watched for a few moments.
The next day he pulled into the yard in the farm truck and unloaded two six-foot pieces of trellis.
He whipped
two sawhorses from the bed, and placed one of the lengths of
trellis across it. Striding to the ramp, he pulled out a tape measure and took three measurements. Back to the trellis, he measured, made pencil marks, then measured again. He saw me watching him. “Measure twice, cut once,” he said.
He plugged in
an extension cord and attached some kind of a saw with a wicked looking
circular blade. “Oh be careful!” I warned.
He didn’t
reply, and I noticed he’d pulled a small, worn metal disk from his back pocket.
“What’s that?”
I asked.
"A chalk line? Where in the world did you get a chalk line?"
He stretched a string across the trellis and snapped it expertly, once, then again, leaving a blue chalk guideline. I plugged my ears as the saw sprang into ear-splitting action, and retreated to the house. When I returned fifteen minutes later, John had cut the second trellis, matched the two pieces perfectly, and had used wood screws to secure the trellises to the ramp. The whole process had taken less than 15 minutes.
He tossed the tools into the back of the truck and as he prepared to drive away I yelled, "Wait! Thank you! I didn't know you could do this kind of stuff, do you think maybe you could do something about the trim on the back porch?...
However, the the wheels of the truck were already moving. "Bye Hon, goin' to do some real work now." And he was gone. He has to make a living for the two of us, and farming is more than a full time job.
But you have to admire this man. He hid his woodworking skills from me for forty years and had me convinced that such things were beyond him. This probably qualifies him for some sort of a cagey husband award, but the cat is out of the bag. I've made a list of a half dozen projects that I now know he is more than capable of completing.
He can run, but he can't hide.
