It is a small house but I feel proud that I helped build it. Stupidly proud really because I didn't do that much really. I was at the height of my snarkly little self. I was big into Shakespeare (primarily to be pretentious) and black holes (ditto the pretentious) and definitely not into manual labor. Because I was smart. Right.
I was the second oldest kid so I got stuck with digging the utilities ditch from the road to the cabin. I had never even thought about ditch digging nor did my 13 year old brain care to ever think about it again. I was digging the 20 feet to the cabin (less if my dad would let me out of it), and then I would never work this hard again. My grandpa offered to show me how it was done.
He told me to straddle the ditch and swing the pick ax. The key to ditch digging, he told me, is to let your legs do the work. I can still see him dressed in a button up shirt (he never wore a t-shirt in his life) and suspenders swinging the pick ax down breaking roots and scattering small rocks .
He was thin and, even then, walked with a slight shuffle. But when he was swinging that pick ax he looked younger. It was like his body just remembered what it was supposed to do and went into work mode. Muscles that were over seventy jumped into action and the grace that was in his ax swing, even then, struck me.
My grandpa was a child of the depression and wore shoes with cardboard in the wet streets of Seattle. His dad was listed in the 1920 census as an unemployed sewer laborer. And my grandpa knew what it was to work. Truth be told, I let him do most of the ditch.
I didn't learn how to work during that summer. I should have. But I was so convinced that manual labor was beneath me that I could see the lessons laid out for me.
My dad and my grandpa sweat all day every day but Sunday building and lifting and using their sweat to make this lovely little cabin I will live in this month. I mostly whined about missing my friends and being bored. But even so, because of their work twenty years ago, I am dry while it rains outside . My whining by the way, didn't build anything.
Some of the paths are overgrown here at the cabin and I spent a few hours today pulling and cutting back the undergrowth. While I did I hummed a song my grandpa used to sing
When you're smiling, when you're smiling
The whole world smiles with you
When you're laughing, when you're laughing
The sun comes shining through
I don't remember him ever singing the next verse about crying. I'm sure he did, I just can't remember it. I don't think I will ever learn to work the way he did. I am a pale sissy-pants who has to run recreationaly to keep her muscles from completely melting away. But when I do work, I want to work like he did...smiling.
He did sing the rest of it, "but when you're crying, when you're crying, you bring on the rain, so quit your crying and be happy again!" He sang the first part of the verse with a big, pouty frown but in the end he was smiling again. There's a stuffed, singing bear on the dresser in the bedroom that can help you remember the words.
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