ESSAY – JAN/FEB 2008

By Joshua Bodwel

“We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” Joseph Campbell

In the winters of my youth, my brother and I would scurry through the cold, dark barn in a rush to reach my grandfather’s glowing workshop.

We dashed past the old horse stall loaded to the rafters with the firewood we had helped split and stack when the trees were still heavy and aflame with leaves. We ignored the lifetime’s worth of clutter that the barn had accumulated: the back-up mast for a sailboat my grandfather had sold years ago; aluminum dairy buckets full of beaten-up golf balls; stacks of bundled newspapers tied with twine; the garden tools; old tires; wood crates; a white rowboat; and several decaying steamer trunks. To my older brother and me, that barn held the most mystical and exotic collection of detritus imaginable—I still picture it whenever I read any book by E.B. White featuring a barn.
My grandfather’s workshop hung precariously off the ass-end of the turn-of-the-century, post-and-beam barn. It was a jumble of half-finished projects long forgotten, but at least one new project was underway at all times because something on the farm always needed fixing.
The shop was low-ceilinged with exposed beams, and its pine floors were splattered with paint and polka-dotted with hardened drips of wood glue. If the wind blew hard enough, racing up the open field behind the barn from the tidal river below, the frost-kissed windowpanes rattled. An oil-drum woodstove in the corner worked furiously to warm the space. When my grandfather fed scraps of wood into the stove, he would sometimes sneak a few puffs on a cigarette, chiding my brother and me not to rat him out to our grandmother. After he had thrown a half-smoked butt into the stove, the room filled with the faint fragrance of tobacco.
Ancient power tools dominated the shop. The medieval-looking band saw, drill press, and cast-iron table saw, all caked with oily chunks of sawdust, seemed old enough to have come from my grandfather’s childhood. The workbench was a clutter of handtools and old mayonnaise, pickle, and peanut butter jars full of screws, nails, nuts, bolts, and washers. There were balls of twine and cigar boxes tipped open with spools and strands of saved string. A couple of big Maxwell House coffee tins were stuffed with pencils, while others overflowed with nails succumbing to various stages of rust. The shelves above the workbench were crammed with dented paint cans and smelly glass bottles whose yellowing, hand-written labels identified the contents as solvents and turpentine that must have been older than my brother and me.
Everything was kept—that was my grandfather’s unspoken philosophy. It was the portrait of a life happily melded together from bits and pieces. My grandfather often dismissed the ramshackle state of his workshop with a wave of his bony hand. He had a way of doing that.
Edwin Harwood Heminway, Jr. was born in 1923. His little brother, my great-uncle, called him “Hardy” when they were kids. Hardy wanted desperately to serve in World War II, but an injury prevented him. In college, he earned a degree in agriculture. He was married to my grandmother for 55 years and left this world less than a year before she did. He fathered three daughters who lived and three boys who did not. I called him “Gramps” and I loved him.
My grandfather was tall and long-armed, skinny but strong. He wore a beard my whole life and I watched it fade from black to gray. He was the kind of man who ate his meals slowly, savoring my grandmother’s cooking. He loved a good joke at the table and often grew teary eyed with laughter. He kept a shotgun under the seat of his pick-up truck, and when I craned my neck down to look at it, I could see the road flicker past through the rust holes in the floorboards. I always felt safe with my grandfather. He hugged me often and hard, wrapping me up in his hulking embrace.
When I think of him now, I remember a simple man. And perhaps because I am older and a father, my Gramps has become more real to me. He is no longer just a patriarchal symbol; he is a man. I sometimes wonder: Was he happy with the way his days played out? Did he get all that he wanted out of life? Now that I understand how painfully complicated life can become, I love my grandfather all the more for his bold, tender simplicity.
Today, I see those hours in my grandfather’s muddled workshop through a prism of happiness. My brother and I helped Gramps with his projects, sanding wood with frayed bits of sandpaper or catching the end of a piece of lumber as it was fed through the table saw. We fashioned crude boats from scraps of two-by-fours saved from the oil-drum woodstove, and used the drill press to bore a perfect mast hole. When I was 15 years old, a fire kindled in that woodstove took the whole barn down in a matter of hours, and left behind little more than ash and memories.
I hope Hardy got what he wanted out of life. I keep a thread of twine tied around my heart that stretches back to my grandfather and the days he gifted me. Even now, I can see the daylight fading outside the workshop windows—me, my brother, and Gramps inside and warm, wrapped in a cocoon of sawdust and wood smoke.