The Village Carpenter

I'm not sure I have any typical days. They all seem to be different, I suppose typical in the fact I'm working wood always, doing the odd jobs around this place that keep it running, and running about after my family and feeding them. 

Tuesday was a good example of this and I had to reflect how I've become that image of a village carpenter, the little jobs coming to me and slotting into my schedule somehow. Friends popping by with a chair to fix or footstool to help make. 

One job was for a plinth, to commemorate a lady who had lived for 94 years. I planed some oak and carved a simple inscription on to it (some dates blanked out to keep it a little private), not a huge job, but one that takes time to set up and complete. 

As the rain hammered against my workshop, I listened to a book as I carved and thought about this lady I didn't know. I wondered if she'd been part of her community like me. An hour before I'd been in the post office, queuing to post some last minute Christmas orders to customers. In there I'd known four people, and met two more I knew as I left, This village has pulled my roots down and grounded me here. 

That night we had tea at a friends (after I'd taken my eldest daughter to a hospital appointment), I work for them a few times a month, but there isn't many weeks in the year where we don't eat with these friends, friends so close they become like family. With childcare shared and swapped, where the school doesn't even question one of us picking up the other's child. Journeys to home filled with laugher and silly jokes shared over a long time. 

The next day I had a farmer bring me some oak for something he wanted making. Brought in a stock box smelling strongly of sheep, the layers of dust on the wood so deep I'd never question the fact he says the oak has been milled 10 years and left drying in his barn. My brother has even done some tree work for him in the past, I could be working on the same tree as him, separated by a decade or more.

But the wood is little good, the using of the oak has cost me more in time. ripping out all the worm and splits. But I wonder if it's having the wood from his land actually used that's more important than the money saving of using it. I hope it is with the effort going into it, as I brush the brown dust from my jacket and hope I have enough from it to finish it before Christmas for him. 

I'm never quite sure what I expected my life to be when I decided I wanted to be a carpenter, but this is more. Its not easy, I work hard and long hours and I could make far more money just being a "normal" carpenter on site somewhere, But this is more.