The Drawers That Wouldn’t Open

The drawer opened. I stood there holding it, not moving, because somewhere in the last five years I had genuinely stopped believing it would.

It’s a rolling tool chest base, the kind with a few drawers down the front, and it has been fully seized for so long I stopped seeing it. Not stuck, not stiff, completely non-functional, a piece of equipment that quietly quit one day while I was busy with something else and never came back. I walked around it so many times it became furniture. Then it became wallpaper. That is what happens to things when the energy it would take to deal with them is energy you simply do not have.

The last five years have been a particular kind of hard. Not dramatic hard, not crisis hard, but the slow cumulative hard of a body running on less than it needs for a long time. I had West Nile when COVID came around, and those two things did not play well together. What that left me with was a daily energy budget that barely covered what the job required, and the job, teaching and coaching and being present for kids every single day, required everything. The woodshop never got fully set up. I worked by moving whatever was in the way of whatever I needed next, tool to tool, material to material, a functional enough system if you were willing to spend the first twenty minutes of every session just clearing a path. I was willing. I didn’t have a better option.

I am not complaining about that. Teaching was the work and the coaching was a gift and I would do it the same way again. But here is what deferred maintenance on a life actually looks like: you walk past the same broken thing for five years until you stop registering that it’s broken. You learn to move around it instead of through it. You do that enough times, in enough places, and the whole property, the whole studio, the whole life starts to feel like a maze of workarounds, and somewhere underneath all of it you carry a low-grade shame you never talk about, because everyone is busy and nobody wants to hear about your tool chest.

Retirement changes the math.

This week I went into the woodshop with no agenda except to start. I took the tool chest apart, drawer by drawer, found the mechanism that had given up, fixed it, put it back together cleaning it as I went. I took every woodshop window apart, cleaned the tracks, cleared the weep holes that were packed so tight I had to dig them out, cleaned the felts, washed the glass. When I peeled the manufacturer stickers off the panes, I realized those windows had never once been cleaned since the day they were installed. The original stickers. A few still had painter's tape from a job done years before. I was the first and only person to have cleaned them.

I scrubbed the floors on my hands and knees before moving anything back to its new place as I organized and laid out a more minimal approach to workflow.
There is something that happens when you do physical work like that, methodical and unglamorous and completely invisible to anyone who might walk in afterward, that I have been trying to put a name to all week. It is not pride exactly, though there is some of that. It is more like a renegotiation. A quiet conversation with the part of yourself that had been managing expectations downward for so long that it forgot what things are supposed to look like when they're actually taken care of. Every drawer that opened, every window that moved clean in its track, was a small argument against the accumulated story that this is just how things are now.

I moved three stainless steel cabinets, combined two of them into a fourteen-foot run along one wall, mapped out the runs for the vacuum system, planned the workflow. I have weeks of work still ahead. But I have a plan now, and a plan is an entirely different thing than a pile of unresolved intentions.

The beginning of taming the chaos. Many tools and boxes still not unpacked.

The commercial belt sander died mid-week, which sent me into two hours of research I hadn't budgeted for. The machine is thirty years old, a size and specification they simply don't manufacture anymore. I found a local guy, one of those shops that smells like oil and competence, who rebuilds electric motors the old way. He thinks he can do it for fifty or sixty dollars. I left it with him and drove home feeling like I had made exactly the right decision about something, which is a feeling worth holding onto when you can find it.

The garden is its own chapter. Forty elm tree starts pulled from one area alone. Grapes, elderberry, gooseberry, goji, blackberries, plums, apples, all of them overgrown and waiting, all of them still alive, still producing, still there despite years of inattention. I cut and pulled and hauled for three hours in one small area and at the end of it I could see ground I couldn't see before. The thistle situation will require cardboard and woodchips and time, which is true of a lot of situations.

The studio I went into once this week. Once. It is in there, patient and slightly accusing, the way studios get when you've been away too long. I know the sequence: woodshop first, then the metal shop, then fabricate the kayak trailer on a proper floor, and then, finally, the studio gets its full attention. That is not avoidance. That is the order of operations for a life being rebuilt from the outside in.

What I keep coming back to, scrubbing floors and pulling weeds and fixing what broke while I was too tired to notice, is that none of it was as bad as the weight of not doing it. The tool chest took maybe forty minutes once I started. The windows took an afternoon. The beds need weeks but they are already responding, already showing green where there was only tangle. The gap between what a thing costs to fix and what it costs to carry unfixed is almost always larger than we think.

You probably have a version of this. A drawer that won't open. A thing you walk past and don't see anymore. Something deferred so long it started to feel like a permanent condition instead of a temporary one. I'm not saying clear your shop this weekend, I am saying the first forty minutes are the hardest and the floor looks different when you've scrubbed it yourself.

The studio is waiting. So am I. Soon.

Top image is the start of attempting to clean one of several garden bed areas.

the bottom is several hours later. Some change but without seeing the beginning it still looks like a mess. Hours to go before I rest.