Okieinexile's Blog

By Bobby Winters

My wife Jean and I are streamlining.

I am very proud of that word “streamlining.” I very nearly wrote the word “downsizing,” but it is not accurate and it carries with it a bunch of other baggage that I am not going to get into. Life is too short.

We’ve been storing a bunch of things, for ourselves and others, and now we are going through them and deciding what we want to store and what we want to keep. This process involves what I will call visitation.  

We are visiting the past. People we knew, people we loved and who loved us, who are no longer “with us” in the common sense that phrase is used, but who are still working beside us in some very meaningful ways.

We are also visiting versions of ourselves from the past. Some of whom are gone for good; some who are gone for ill; some who return to use from time to time.

I found a bookshelf that I made before I would’ve considered myself a woodworker. I look at it now and am astonished in a number of ways.  

It’s made from one-by-eight white pine that I must’ve bought at Sutherland Lumber back when we still had one. It’s not particularly good wood. There is a big old knot-hole right through the top. It’s not big enough to get a book through, and that’s probably the only consideration I had. 

I made it before I had a workshop, work table, or even a picnic table to work on.  I remember doing most of my work on it while kneeling on the ground. The most remarkable thing is that I used only glue in its construction. Glue and dowels. This is more remarkable because I think I only had one clamp in those days, and it wasn’t particularly suited to the task.

I’d built this bookshelf more than thirty-five years ago.  We used it for a long time, then at some point we could afford “better,” and we put it in storage. After I got back into woodworking, I remember it with something akin to embarrassment. I visited in my memory, but not physically.

I came face-to-face with it again.  We removed the books that we had been storing on it so they could be shared more widely.  Then I looked at what I had made.

I was surprised.

The years had given the wood–cheap, cheap pine from Sutherland–a wonderful patina.  While my joinery has certainly improved, the bookshelf is still quite solid.  The glue had held; the dowels are still in place.

It is a monument to redneck ingenuity. 

I dusted it off and gave it a nice coating of boiled linseed oil.  I cleaned out a spot for it in my shop that just happened to be the perfect size, and it’s now helping me organize my shop.

Jean is kind of jealous that I grabbed it for myself, so I  might have to make a new one for her special, now that I actually know what I am doing.

I also found a couple of old-fashioned soda-pop cases.  I had attempted–and that is stretching that word to the point where it snapped–to restore one of them.  This is to say, I’d tried to redo the paint.  I shudder every time I look at it or think about it.

Not my forte’.

I’ll be using these to store things in my shop as well, but they are also the source of a new project. I am in the process of making a copy of one of them.

These were boxes that were designed to be made in an assembly line fashion. No dovetails; no mortise and tenon. They used nails, honest to God nails, as well as thin metal straps.

I had to make a run to the north end of town to buy both of these things.

I’ve made the sides out of some oak that was recovered from some renovation at church and the bottoms out of pine that I re-cut from some two-by-four studs.

I’m not quite done yet, but it’s coming along quite nicely.

We are built upon who we were. Every once in a while, we need to throw away some things, but we also need to save some things.

We can look at our old selves dispassionately from a distance. More accurately this time and, perhaps, just a bit more kindly.

Bobby Winters grew up near Harden City, Oklahoma.  He teaches mathematics and computer science, does woodworking, and blogs at okieinexile.com. He invites you to visit the blog and to subscribe.