“My father never spoke in parables, but his hands told stories clearer than any sermon. In wood, he found truth. In silence, understanding.”
The sander thrummed in my grip, its vibration crawling up my forearm like a pulse, like memory. Mahogany dust hung in the warm air, rich and sharp, smelling of patience, of near-perfection, of something earned slowly. I squinted down at the wood, hunting for signs, imperfections, symmetry, meaning. Something to tell me when it was done.
“Stop looking at it. Just know.”
My father’s voice cut through the hum, gruff, worn down to its grain, like the oak he often worked. He didn’t look up from his bench. He didn’t need to. His hands knew. They didn’t check, they remembered.
“I think it’s good,” I said, uncertain.
He rose, slow and deliberate, the way old trees lean into wind. His back bowed from years bent over benches, bent over mistakes, bent over life. He crossed the shop floor in three quiet strides, no level, no square, just his fingertips, feathering over the surface like a blind man reading truth in the dark.
“No. That ain’t done.”
It felt smooth to me. But to him? The wood whispered back its flaws, imperceptible ridges, tremors in the grain, a pencil line-thickness of error only muscle memory could detect. I went back to the sander, gentle now, like I was coaxing a secret out of the wood rather than forcing it to speak. Too much pressure and it would burn. Too little and it would never sing.
Then again, without a word, he stepped beside me and raised his hand. Stop.
He’d felt it. Counted the strokes in his mind like a musician keeping time. Knew the moment, the weight, the balance. As if the timber had confessed and he’d forgiven it.
“That’s good.”
And it was.
This was his craft. His religion. A German-born finish carpenter who once built coffins and guitars. His hands didn’t guess, they remembered. They didn’t calculate—they knew. I learned there at the hem of his apron, wondering if one day mine would speak too.
Years later, I run my fingers along a cabinet face in someone else’s home. The ghost of his touch moves through me. The grain is smooth, ready. I don’t have to look.
I know.
BB Grey--musings 
Leave a reply to Violet Lentz Cancel reply