If you keep it...you end up with a little bench!

“If you keep it. You will always have it.”

Words recently passed on to me by my mother. Passed through generations. Passed to my mother by her mother. It’s a simple thought easily discarded as elementary, superfluous, redundant. But I can’t stop thinking about the plain wisdom underneath it. How it is applicable to all facets of life.

A couple weeks ago I was at a family reunion, a gathering that happens every 22 years for our immediate family. We are spread literally across countries and continents. The fact that we are able to be in the same place at the same time is nothing short of miraculous. When I arrived my Mum asked me if I could build her a small bench for the front porch. In the back corner of the basement were some old pine boards from bookshelves my parents had been carrying around for over 40 years. I remembered the bookshelves vividly from my childhood. I remembered the books on English literature, Renaissance art, and Greek myths standing upright on the mahogany stained shelves. The shelves crossed state and country borders with our family. House to house they found a space against a wall. Until finally finding themselves stacked upright in the basement. Kept but presumably unnecessary. Their house is much smaller than the houses we used to live in and many of the books have been passed on to other bookshelves in other households.

Using my father’s and grandfather’s tools I went to work in the little driveway beside the house. Spending a couple hours each day on the project. Jointing edges with a Skil saw and block plane. I’ve grown reliant on table saws, planers, jointers, shapers, router tables, Japanese chisels, etc., so it may not be my prettiest work. The point wasn’t to make an exquisite piece of furniture. It was to create something simple and functional out of something that had always been simple and functional. Create it from something that had been kept by my family and now would continue to be kept. Because,

“If you keep it…”