Sawdust and water
Quenching thirst
The lathe lumbered up to a slow crawl, the raw stock slapping the air around it as it turned. He tipped the gouge into the stock; large chips of unwanted wood danced into the air and landed in a heap around his Texas Steer work boots.
The smell of sawdust brings me back to the basement of the Van Buren house. My dad was a carpenter-writer-inventor-farmer-chef-hobo-hustler for whom self-reliance was the pinnacle of existence. He was a better writer than a carpenter, a better inventor than a writer and a better farmer than an inventor. He was a skilled carpenter who could carve a rabbet joint free-hand using just a chisel and plane, with the low-tolerance precision of a machine.
When I was growing up, he tilled up most of our backyard on an inner-city lot to grow a Victory Garden. For most of my childhood until I can remember, I was plowing, watering, hoeing, picking, weeding.
I hated summer vacation.
We had three crops of okra, a continuous supply of tomatoes, two crops of carrots, cucumbers, squash of every flavor, peas, radishes and corn. One year we grew strawberries, but discovered rabbits woke up earlier in the morning than kids on summer break. It was a one-year crop.
My mom was a canning-food-processing machine. Everything was pickled, stewed or frozen, and none of it went to the neighbors. We had a converted closet on the second floor to hold all the jars from pickles to homemade catsup to spaghetti sauce to canned corn. In the basement, under the stairs, we had tomatoes under blankets in ripening beds and huge crockpots full of cabbage being slowly made into sauerkraut. Store-bought was what rich kids did.
I received a call years later when he needed money. He told me he wanted to dig a well on his property, that he needed a few hundred dollars. I agreed to buy an old manual typewriter I remembered from my childhood for four hundred dollars.
He got water; I quenched a thirst.