Lessons From Sawdust
January 13, 2014
As a fourth grader, my first job was as a “step & fetch it” with my dad, a small town carpenter — meaning for a dollar a day, I ran to and from the pickup to get the precise tool needed while he had his hands full. For a little guy, the sights and sounds of those first job sites were cool: piles of lumber, ladders up the roof, the scream of circular saws making cuts. But one thing stood out among them all: the smell of sawdust from those cuts. To a carpenter, it takes on the smell of ambrosia. Anytime you smell it, it means you’ve got work. It means things are good.
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