So, why do they stare?

I feel like I should explain myself: Why did I spend so much time over the past weeks talking to people about tools? Upon several occasions I got funny looks when I explained what I was working on. Maybe I seem out of place in hardware stores or backyard shops, but I feel right at home.

When I was small my parents built a house from the ground up in southern Louisiana. Some of my earliest memories are of ladders in the living room and trouble lights strung like Christmas strands over 2-by-4s that crisscrossed our ceiling. Years later, my family moved to another state and began the process of home construction again. The sounds of pounding hammers and jingling nails, the whirring of the table saw, and the slip drag of plywood from its stack to the concrete slab melted into a music I still hear and love.

And soon, we were at it again in the piney hills of Louisiana, restoring the “Old McBride Place.” We began by demolishing walls in order to extend the back of the structure deep into the yard, stopping just short of a 200-year-old pecan tree.

I thought my surroundings were perfectly normal. Dad left tools all over the house, often right where he stopped work on his project. I thought everyone had wrenches and handsaws shoved in cabinets and that all girls knew the smell of melting tar and the rough texture of shingles.

I also thought that all homes were decorated with old hay forks or hand plows or old rusting tools that had outlived their usefulness. Mom was constantly dragging one iron skeleton after another out of the brush near the edges of the old home place. She’d sometimes glue dried flowers to a handle and lean the item in a corner for decoration. Tools were something to be honored, even in their time of redundancy.

When I moved into my first apartment, I didn’t have to build anything. It was amazing to simply unpack my few boxes and call the space my own. Dad must’ve known I was a little lost, because he brought me a tool box the first week with a few necessities and told to me to fill it up as I went along.

I now know that not everyone shared my experience, and I realize that I was just lucky. So I found some experts to help explain what tools should go in a tool box, and to offer guidance on organizing tools in a garage or shop – advice I’ll probably send on to my dad. I even found a fellow to talk about antique tools – most of which end up hanging on people’s walls these days.