Wooden it be nice?

Wooden it be nice
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 22, 2014

I was mother to two sons before I became mother to a daughter. A mother of sons knows that Stegosaurus had a brain the size of a walnut. She knows buttons in lifts are for pressing, all at once, so passengers can appreciate the identical landings on every floor. And she knows it’s impossible to pass by a construction site without stopping to gawp.

But when I visited a school fete last weekend, it was my four-year-old daughter who spotted the carpentry tent first. “Hammers!” she shouted to her brother, and the pair of them darted off into the crowd.

I dutifully followed, lugging a bag of second-hand books, a tomato seedling and two half-eaten clouds of fairy floss wrapped around grimy sticks. “The Joy of Wood,” said the sandwich board propped at the tent-front. “$2 per child. No experience required.”

That’s lucky, I thought, as my daughter grabbed a hammer from one of the workbenches and swung it over her head. The dad behind her dodged sideways. “Not so high!” I cried. I whispered “Sorry!” to the dad. He flashed me a grin.

I glanced around to locate 7-year-old son. He’d discovered the sawing station and was trying to hack through a chunk of pine with a hand saw, his legs splayed, frowning with concentration.

A man wearing a well-hung tool belt and a name-tag ‘Greg’ upended a hessian sack of wood scraps into a plastic clam shell on the grass. Kids dropped to their knees and rummaged through the heap. Two small boys grappled over a triangular piece peppered with drill holes. The loser zig-zagged away sobbing to find his mum.

My youngster was still engrossed at the sawing station. Greg showed him how to fix an offcut into a vice. “Measure twice. Cut once,” I heard Greg say. “Hold the saw gently. Elbows in. That’s it!” Boy and tool became acquainted and began to work seamlessly.

“Let’s make a treasure box, hey?” I suggested to my daughter, noticing all the dads were making bigger boxes. I sifted through plywood and pine, searching for rectangles of similar size. But every piece was a different thickness. Unwisely, I gave my 4-year-old the power of veto over slabs she didn’t like. She used it indiscriminately, rejecting the only matching pair I dug out. “I don’t like the colour,” she said, inspecting one offcut. “And it’s got a rough bit. See?”

“That’s a knot,” I informed her. “That’s where a branch grew out of the tree.” She shrugged and threw the piece back on top of the pile. The victor from the tug-of-war dived across me to grab it.

Under the tarpaulin, the pounding of twenty hammers was hurting my ears. We claimed a workbench in the sun and got to work on our box project.

At first I felt clumsy. I’d forgotten how hard it is to bang a nail in straight. I struggled to keep my timber steady. My right angles ranged from 85 to 95 degrees. I spent more time ripping out duds with the pincer than using the hammer. Daughter sighed as she collected my bent nails from the grass. “They look like worms!” she said.

But as my confidence grew, the hammer began to feel at home in my hand. Lining up hammer head to nail head, I swapped blind faith for belief, then certainty. I no longer worried about smashing my thumb. The nails drove straight in. I banged them flush with half a dozen easy knocks.

My daughter was a navvy in a previous life. She didn’t flinch when I pinched her thumb to free a splinter. She got her hands dirty. She carefully selected my next nail from the container and held the pincer at the ready. In under an hour, we produced a box. It had a makeshift lid anchored to one corner by a long nail, allowing it to swivel open.

I put her in charge of quality testing while I cleaned up our mess. She yanked the lid sideways, left and right, but it didn’t give way. She scrounged under a nearby Eucalyptus and filled her treasure box with two gumnuts and a gold bottle top, then swung the lid closed. I don’t know who was prouder of our handiwork. Me, I decided.

Greg wandered over and pointed out my son, who was still sawing away, a growing pile of wood scraps at his feet. “There’s always one!” Greg said, chuckling. “All they want to do is saw. No building, no hammering. Just sawing. Boy discovers the mystical pleasures of manual labour!”

I nodded. “That was the best fun I’ve had in ages. Why does woodwork feel so satisfying?”

“It just does,” said Greg. “It’s good for the soul.”