![]() ![]() In my mind, I knew what to do.īut when my father called to see if I was up for the project, again I hesitated. I’ll have to alter the trim around the window. The floors probably aren’t level, I figured, and reminded myself how to correct for that. I made them more real in my head, more possible. “I’d like to start unpacking those books.”īack in Cambridge, I kept thinking about the cases. “Keep me posted on the shelves,” my dad said as we left. These were all things I’d done before, had seen Mary do. An outlet on one wall would mean notching a hole in the back. I’d have them match the height of the window trim, I thought, keep that line consistent around the room. I pieced the cases together mentally, starting with the bases on which they’d sit, moving on to the frames, the shelves, the trim. Could I? I knew how to do this, didn’t I? I went through the steps in my head, the ones I’d learned from Mary and done with her many times. My reaction when he’d asked was immediate and surprising. I went to bed that night and thought about the cases. I told him I wasn’t sure what my schedule was with Mary these days. I did not want to admit that the thought of it scared me. For me to build them? By myself? I could not say out loud that I wasn’t sure I could, that after these years with Mary, I doubted my ability to build cases on my own. The relaxed feeling brought on by an evening of fireside laughs shifted to a storm of doubt. “Bookcases,” he said toward the enormous blank spaces on the wall. My father stood, looked at me, and raised his hands toward either side of the fireplace. Darkness settled, the window out to the feeder reflected the lamps, the stone fireplace, our faces. He talked about how you could feel the presence of a hawk nearby-the birds would still, then scatter.Īfter watching the birds, we turned our attention back inside, toward the fire. When one swooped in to scope the scene from the branches nearby, he would forecast which feeder the little bird would go to-pole, ground, or suet. ![]() ![]() They fluttered and fed, some pecking at the feeder that sat atop a pole, some on the ground picking at seeds, some at the small cage of white suet that hung from a branch, cow fat white like snow. Tubby morning doves, bright darting cardinals, feathers a duller red than their full-force summer color, a nuthatch, some chickadees, a woodpecker. Outside the window, the bird feeder was a flurry of action. Many boxes stacked in the basement remained to be unpacked, most of them labeled BOOKS.ĭuring one of the first visits there, we sat near the fireplace, my brothers, father, and I, and our respective romantic partners. To visit his new home was to see the familiar items from our growing up freed from dark boxes in a storage cell. My father finally collected his belongings out of the storage bay they’d been occupying for six years. I could picture it immediately.Īround this time, my father and his girlfriend bought a house together in the woods by a tidal river in southeastern Massachusetts. ”Bookcases,” he said toward the enormous blank spaces on the wall. We parted ways with a hug and Christmas wishes, knowing it might be some months before we paired up again. I’m scared shitless about how much the plumbing is going to cost.” “Give me a call if you want some help,” I said. I swung by her place to pick up the last check she owed me before we took our annual break. After the skylight, in the slowing of the year, Mary planned to pause the progress on her third-floor office space in favor of redoing a bathroom downstairs, the one with the paintbrushes in the tub and the crumbling walls. The maple leaves dropped, the temperature fell, and we slipped into winter. In this section MacLaughlin strikes out on her own to craft bookshelves for her father and meditates on the relationship between writing and carpentry, and learning to build with wood instead of words. The following is an excerpt from Nina MacLaughlin’s memoir Hammer Head-the story of MacLaughlin’s journey out of a drag-and-click job at a newspaper and into a carpentry apprenticeship. ![]()
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