–Henry David Thoreau
It may be true, as the Hebrew scriptures teach, that children are an inheritance from the Lord, and blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them, but it is also true that tools are an inheritance from our fathers, and blessed is the man whose crib or machine shed is full of them.
There’s a theology to this, and an ontology too, and I’ll get ’round at least to the former, but let it be established at the start that the inheritance of tools—not so much of machines, though there’s a theology there as well, but of tools—is one of life’s great boons.
I acknowledge that there’s a distaff side to all this. My espoused saint has many heirlooms and keepsakes that have descended to her from her mother, her grandmothers, and more recently from her late sister, and I acknowledge the value of these keepsakes. I honor their place in our domicile. But what interests me here has aught to do with doilies and vases, rings and necklaces and armoires.
What interests me is the fluting tool that once belonged to Dietrich Peters, a taciturn first-generation German farmer, about whom I would not be writing had his forebears remained in the Ukraine to starve in Stalin’s artificial famine that claimed, by some estimates, ten million people in one year. I have never shaved so much as a single curl of hard fragrant cherry with this fluting tool, and perhaps I never will, but I often take it down from its shelf above my workbench to handle it, feel the heft of it, admire its design, and clean it. A stranger once offered me a lot of money for it. Hah!
I also own a pine tool box this same grandfather made. There’s a hinged lid on top restricted by two small chains on either side, and beneath them are two drawers. I keep it beside my reading chair, near the fireplace, and use it as a little table to rest my tumbler on. I remember once my uncle was visiting us—my grandfather’s youngest son—and he eyed the tool box. This is the uncle who still lives on the ancestral farm and tends to the second of two tractors my grandfather owned. He must have been wondering how his overeducated no-account nephew came into possession of so prized a vestige. I could have shown him the farmer’s cap—the old green cap—that also belonged to Grandpa Peters, or the bibs, or the barn jacket, or the fluting tool, or the sockets and ratchet, but I didn’t. What if the farm itself, its tractor and fields and river and buildings, were an insufficient birthright?
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