Unintended Inheritance

Maintenance crews were trimming the trees downtown the other day, and while a few people in my office were grumbling about the noise, the sound of chainsaws hit me with a fierce, visceral wave of nostalgia: Dad clearing brush as my sister and I stomped around in muck boots on one of those bright early spring days where the sun is warm only if you keep moving, and the mud is too icy to play with long. 

I need a chainsaw, I emailed Jesse, and I need it right now. 

Maybe wait until we have 40 acres? he emailed back. 

I'm a city person through and through, and as much as the thought of homesteading appeals to my romantic side - chickens! llamas! acres of organically grown tomatoes! - I fully understand I'd starve to death without seven different kinds of takeout within walking distance. For as long as I can remember, I was desperate to escape my rural upbringing and move somewhere more exciting; now that I'm here, I love our house, love our neighborhood, love our city, and could never picture myself anywhere else. 

But then there's the sound of chainsaws in the spring. 

In January, we lost the patriarch of my dad's side of the family. Grandpa died suddenly, peacefully, only the day before his 92nd birthday. He was a marine biologist who worked at Bonneville Dam for most of his career, and with my grandmother somehow managed to guide four wildly unruly kids into being my amazing father and incredible aunts. He was a master builder in every sense of the word: furniture, buildings, family. 

The memorial for Grandpa was held last weekend, and it was a seminal family event: cousins and friends and old neighbors, and I laughed so hard my ribs hurt for days. It was the sort of huge, joyous event that only happens when my dad and his sisters get together, and if Grandpa had been there, he'd have been sitting in the middle of it all, chuckling to himself (and probably shaking his head). Several of us grandkids read letters written by our parents about their father, and Grandpa's legendary woodworking skills were highlighted in every single one. 

In his letter, my dad said Grandpa's shop was a magical place, where anything could be created or fixed. That's exactly how I felt about my dad's half of the garage. Need some pipe cleaners? There they are. Need a nail for something? There are giant boxes of them, in every size imaginable. Need some thickener for a mud pie? You could choose between thick shavings, thin shavings, wood chips and fine sawdust. Dad's shop was one of the constants of my childhood: it was there, it was Dad's, it had what you needed.

If someone had told my grumpy 15-year-old self I'd eventually be recreating Dad's shop, I'd have rolled my eyes. No, I was going to live in a glass and steel apartment, surrounded by cats and computers. I was going to escape the life of being press-ganged into painting trim and raking the lawn. 

Fast-forward thirteen years. I have a shop with lots of nails. I have tools that produce four different kinds of sawdust. I've fixed electrical and plumbing, and I'm blogging about some of it. At Grandpa's memorial, relatives who read this blog kept coming up and telling me how much like Grandpa I've become (which despite being a great honor is frankly mostly horrifying, because I don't think they understand exactly how bad I am at finishing projects, and I cringe at the thought of Grandpa or Dad walking around and critiquing my progress).

This transition was an accident. I didn't wake up one day and say, "Hey, you know what sounds great? Finding drywall crumbles in all the empty cereal bowls. Let's make that happen!" I was sent off to college with a really great basic tool set - you know, hammer, picture nails, tape measure, etc - that gradually got added to until I ended up with a miter saw on the kitchen table and a bottle of paint remover by my toothbrush. The only thing I can think of is that the act of renovation, of building, was absorbed into my DNA, where it lurked until it could no longer be contained. 

 Grandpa built things, and Dad hung around and watched him do it. 

Years later, Dad worked in his own shop and listened to the Seahawks on AM radio while little Kylie awkwardly hammered nails into scrap. 

If you ask me what I get from my family, I'm as likely to say "sense of humor" as anything else, but my real inheritance is this: the inclination to change our surroundings, the need to create, the desire to work with our hands. (The occasional pig-headedness that says FULL STEAM AHEAD when really, we should just put our tools away and call it a night.) 

So yeah, maybe I'm more like Dad and Grandpa than I thought. Now I just need to learn how to finish a project. 

(And maybe buy a chainsaw.)