Old tools

The sweat of ages storing wisdom in their handles…

You can polish a piece of timber by rubbing it with a piece of leather. It takes a long time and is a pretty pointless exercise given the world of polishes and other finishes out there, but it can be done. A little oil in the leather will help to seal it too. So rubbing with something soft and a bit fatty will bring up a sheen.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately — as I have been doing the gardening. There is a lot of gardening going on here at the moment. The last time I gardened like this was on a much smaller scale at Mum’s when I was at university. I built a garden of lavender and daisies and tall standard gardenias along the side of the house while I was meant to be writing a film script and studying.

I used the tools that I had always used for gardening. They were the tools that Dad used to carve our previous garden out of the bush at Turramurra. Before that, I think, most of them belonged to Mum’s cousin June and her first husband.

The handles of the tools were dark brown wood polished by three generations of calloused hands and sweat.

One of the things I miss most from home is those tools.

Every time I picked them up the hard wooden handles would fall into the correct grip — subtly re-shaped by years of use. And as the day wore on, and my sweat mingled with the sweat of ages in the timber I felt comforted. I was never alone with those tools. If some gardening…