a typical day of laundry, mid-pediculosis. Looks quaint in sepia tone, no?

It’s like I’m waking up from a long sleep.  Why, hello there. Hello! The word sounds funny having not used it for so long. Hello! Hello! Hello!

Yeah, weird.

I got a lovely note from Sarah at Mum in Bloom, saying kindly, “where are you? I hope you are okay.”  Thank you, Sarah. Thank you for asking. I am. Everyone here is, knock wood. Here are a few of the factors in my vaporization from the interweb:

1. Big deadlines. Been writing lots. Lots of articles, press releases. The biggest news is that one project is a book manuscript, a co-authorship with Beth Bader, who writes over at Expat Chef. Food and families, families and food. Recipes, tips, resources, and a tad or irreverance.  It’ll be out in like a million years. But our own deadline is November 1. For many, many months, this seemed far away. I was able to say things like, “oh, it won’t take long to complete.” “We’ve got so much of the information already.” Then, around the time I came back from carpentry camp, the deadline became real. Surprise: it takes plenty long to complete a book. It’s not complete yet, but I see a light, which means I am in a tunnel, and I am nearly through.

2. Small people. Weeks of no child-care at the end of the summer. No camps, no school, just kids, bored and restless. I literally did a victory dance on the first day of school.

3. Small creatures. I should have known not to test fate with that victory dance. My karmic payback came on the second day of school, when we got a phone call from another 2nd grade family. This was a phone call no one wants: head lice. We were not spared. Just like that: weeks gone. Laundry, so much laundry. Non-stop vacuuming. Nose hairs being burned off by pediculicides, which is just a fancy way of saying hideous toxic chemicals.

My face in Merrie’s wild curly hair, pulling out all signs of pediculosis, which is just a fancy way of saying bugs. Did you know that lice reproduce sexually? Yes, tiny bugs were gettin’ busy, makin’ whoopie, beddin’ down, knockin’ boots, right there among the shafts of my daughter’s hair. I tried not to think about it too much.

Did I mention I was supposed to be finishing a book manuscript during this time?

4. Big pain. I sat hunched over my daughters hair and I sat hunched over the computer. For a solid month, I sat. I sat so much that I threw my back out. Yes, I am possibly the only person to ever throw her back out from sitting. Yes, that is humiliating. Don’t pity me, though: in my younger, healthier days, I once mocked a man who threw his back out while putting on socks. There’s that karmic payback again.

my new chair

5. Big ball. Physical therapy, yoga, long walks, stretching, bike rides, one of those giant medicine balls to sit on while I write. I am sitting on it now. No, I do not feel silly. Yes, that is only because you cannot actually see me. Yes, sometimes I bounce up and down on it like a small child.

That’s where I’ve been. May we just pretend it’s two months ago, please?

Hello.

This is the last thing I’ll write about carpentry class here for a while. Promise. But if you missed the other parts, you might consider reading:
Part I. Arriving
Part II. Who we are
Part III. Power Tools
Part IV. Precision
Part V. Foul-mouthed beauties

That's me with my tool belt, yo

When it was all over —after we’d shared a tiny, touching graduation ceremony in the shed we’d built, after we had laughed and taken photos of our work and wished each other good luck on our next projects, after a final meal together and final hugs —I packed up and came home to Life As I Know It.

The girls had enjoyed a great week with their dad — Camp Daddy, they’d dubbed it. While I had stood in the sun beside a pile of lumber, they had visited Ben and Jerry’s, the Vermont Teddy Bear Company, Shelburne Farms, the ECHO Lake Aquarium Center, Circus Smircus, two libraries. They had been swimming, hiking, visiting a series of cafes and restaurants. Many mornings I had left the hotel before they woke up, and a few evenings, I had returned after they had gone to sleep. Now, the week done, we were back together — a family once again.

On the drive home, the girls listened to an audiotape of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Charlotte flipped through picture books, mouthing words she cannot read, and Merrie leaned into my seat from behind, draping her arms casually over my sunburned shoulders. The evening sun cast long shadows on the valley farmland. As Blair drove, I pulled my knitting out — the first I’d touched my scarf since the welcome dinner five days before — and thought about the week.

I thought about boards that did not fit, about cuts that were not even, about ten beautiful women with foul mouths and strong arms, about a small, not-quite-finished shed standing in a beautiful valley that my own hands had helped build.

My heart cracked a little as I realized that it was all over, just like that.

I want this for my own girls someday. Whatever they do, whatever life brings, I hope they will always be able to make the choice to do something for themselves, to leave behind the “shoulds” and go learn something unexpected. If they can do it surrounded by supportive women who laugh easily, all the better.

I’m still no master carpenter; this I know. However the words that swam before my eyes on day one no longer feel so foreign. I know the difference between a joist and a jam, between a block and plate, between a shill and a truss. I know what it means to place studs “16 on center,” and I know that when it’s time to rebuild our deck, we’ll need to use galvanized deck screws, both for shear strength and to avoid a galvanic reaction between the nail and the copper in the wood. Look at me: I know about galvanic reactions.

I know how often carpenters use math — in adding and subtracting fractions, in using the Pythagorean theorem to calculate the length of, say, a roof rafter.

I know that there are things that I can do — with time, effort, and perhaps a little more precision than I put into most things.

Mostly, though, I know more about the world around me. On the first morning, Patti mentioned how metal contracts and expands with the weather. “Have you ever heard a tin roof on a hot day?” she asks. “The way it goes, ‘tink, tink, tink’?” I didn’t, though I didn’t want to say so.

Since then, though I’ve heard it. I’m sure I’ve heard it thousands of times before; once upon a time I even lived under a tin roof in an African country. But I’d never actually heard it. Now I can hear it, and it sounds like music.

I can look at tiger’s eye maple — a lovely, distinct, circular marking — and think, “caused by a fungus.” I notice a beautiful wide-plank floor, and I can see the joints are all in a row, rather than staggered as they should be. I see things. I see the trim in my closet and think, “huh, they should have covered the nails with some kind of wood putty.” I see the place in my living room where crown molding can go, the battered strip of wainscoting in my kitchen that I suddenly observe needs replacing.

I am aware, and this makes me feel more…alive, I guess. Like the world is richer than I understood a few weeks ago, like maybe there will always, always be more to discover.

Like maybe anything is possible.

One of the last things that I did before leaving the school was to look again at the library bookshelves, the ones that had mesmerized me on that first night. I noticed aspects of them that I hadn’t that first night: that the shelves themselves were actually made with plywood, which is stronger than a solid board, then covered with a strip of maple. That a few of the shelves were too long, and were beginning to bow under the weight of the books. That the shelves themselves were resting on small strips of wood that had been attached  the vertical boards. That even as lovely as they were, these shelves were imperfect. I could see the imperfections, just as I could see, in my mind’s eye, how the shelves were created in the first place: laid out on the floor, meticulously measured and marked, cut and nailed, measured again, then lifted and secured into place.

It felt good to know. It feels good to know.

And those lovely women who cut and hauled, pounded and measured, who whooped with me beneath an August sun, cracking Mad Hat beers at the end of each work day, each of whom has now returned home to her own projects, her own next steps?

Yeah, I’m really glad I know them, too.

Part five of an absurdly lengthy meditation of my week at Yestermorrow. This one comes with a warning label. I’m generally pretty good about not cursing here, aware that all kinds of people, including my mother, are reading. But this one is specifically about language. Colorful language. Offended by the F-word? The S-word? The D-word? Move on, then. Nothing to see here.

***

We curse like sailors. Or perhaps I mean like carpenters.

It begins gingerly; on our first morning together, our instructors show us different types of nails of increasing length and heft — a six-penny (6d), an eight-penny (8d), a twenty-penny (20d). Then Patti holds up a railroad stake. “And this is what we call a BFN,” she says.

A few understand right away. A few dutifully write down in their notebooks — we are still taking notes at this point — “BFN.”

Someone asks, “a what?”

Another explains: “A big fuckin’ nail.”

From there, we get more comfortable, and our language gets looser. Our cursing is of course aided by the frustration that learning any new task involves — particularly a task where a measurement that is off by a mere 1/32 of an inch can ruin an entire morning’s work.

There are bent nails, a wobbly cut with the circular saw, a board cut too small, a beating sun on a hot, humid day. All bring forth colorful language from our lips. Crap. Shit. Fuck.

One morning, I work with Donna, a trim 50-something nurse from central Massachusetts. She has short, cropped hair, small round glasses, and speaks softly, with a slight twang that sounds vaguely Midwestern. She seems efficient, orderly, and kind — exactly the kind of nurse you’d want to see when you rush into the emergency room injured, or carrying a sick child. Donna has two grown sons, at least one of whom is married, and it isn’t difficult to picture her a few years from now, cooing to a grandchild.

“I just love the word ‘fuck,’” chirps Donna cheerily as she measures a wooden board. “It’s just such a satisfying thing to say.”

Then, by way of explanation, she tries it out. “Fuck,” she says, then grins at me. “Isn’t that just a great word?”

It wasn’t unusual to turn and see a classmate whacking a stubborn 20d nail — about 4 inches long — in frustration, huffing rhythmically, with every pound of the nail, “Get! In! There! You! Fuckin’ Fuckin! Nail!”

Once finished with that nail, she might nod with satisfaction, or she might just pick up another nail and start pounding.

Another classmate might take the “BFNP” — a three-foot nail puller that we nicknamed Big Bertha — engaged in the process of wrenching out a bent 20d nail. With her butt stuck far out, and her face clenched, she would place all of her body weight and strength into pulling the nail. This is neither a simple business, nor a flattering one. She might grunt as she pulled, or she might roar — “Aarrghh!” —  like a pirate. Just as likely, an involuntary, “fuuuuuuuuuuck,” might escape her lips.

Or maybe she has just spent time cutting a series of blocks to place between wall studs. She measured carefully, she cut precisely, and she clearly marked which block was destined for which space. Yet something went wrong: now that they are ready to place, none of them fit. So she stands scratching her head, holding a too-short block — now a useless piece of scrap wood . “What the fuck…” she murmurs, frustrated and confused. “I mean…crap.”

The next week, I try to describe the scene to my father.

“I get it,” he says, nodding like he understands. “You were women acting like men.”

I can see why he would say that, can see how it might look like that from the outside. But he is wrong.

Men have nothing to do with it; they are nowhere on that lot. Neither in person, or as models for who we are becoming. They aren’t in our minds, even unconsciously; there’s simply too much work for us to go around “acting” like anyone. We are women, we are pounding the crap out of nails, and we are cursing as we do it.

Research shows that cursing can both ease pain, and create an emotional release.  So there’s that. But I suspect there’s something else, as well. For many of us — for me, at least — simply coming here, standing here in this lot, building a shed with power tools and lengths of wood, required pushing some of my day-to-day boundaries. It required leaving my children for days at a time to learn something I want to learn, purely for me. It required abandoning any sense of what a middle-aged woman, a mother, a wife, is supposed to do, how she should behave.

Later, when the week is over, I will see a photo of myself. In this photo, I am standing firmly, with legs apart, safety goggles over my eyes, earphones covering my ears, a tool belt around my waist. I don’t look like the mothers I see at children’s soccer practices, or at book group, or at the gym. I can think of many people in my life — plenty of people who love me, even — who might shudder to see me as I am now, with this hammer in my hand.

We are women, absolutely. We are mothers and daughters and wives and sisters, and we never forget this — how could we? But we are also women who decided to remove our own restraints, to shed the old rules — rules that seem increasingly ridiculous. We have freed ourselves, and as a result, we are getting something done. I have to confess: it feels glorious.

So we curse. We curse as we cut floor joists. We curse as we build walls. We curse when the walls go up, when the nails go in. We curse through studs and shills, rafters and metal roofs, wind-bracing and tar paper and nails and screws and siding. We curse through heat and humidity, through blisters and sweat and sunburned shoulders, through sore backs and the aching of mysterious, previously-unknown muscles. We curse through perhaps a thousand nails, 150 strips of wood, and innumerable measurements and cuts.

After five days of cursing, we have something to show for it. Where once we had a pile of lumber, we now have a shed. It’s not quite complete, but it is all there: a floor that can be walked on. Walls that stand up on their own. A roof that (at last!) blocks out the sun. We built this. Just us. Not an x-chromosome among us.

It is perhaps the prettiest thing I have ever seen.

In our final hour, we sit inside our structure, talking about what projects come next for us. Donna, the nurse from Massachusetts talks about her dream of building a home with her sons.

Theresa, whose three children are grown, nods.  “You never stop being a mother,” she says.

“That’s right,” said Donna. Then she grins and adds, “a motherFUCKER!”

We explode with laughter. In any other setting, this might have been a wildly inappropriate thing to say. But here we are, sitting on the floor that we built, in the shade of the walls that we constructed, beneath the roof that we nailed on.

We built this thing, just the eleven of us, and we did it by our own hands. We can say anything we want.

***

You’re almost there! Last installment, Part. VI. Coming Home, up next.

Here’s part IV of my carpentry experience.

***

This is not work for the imprecise. I realize that right away.

I’ve never been precise; I am impatient and scattered, and for all the time I spend in the kitchen, I know enough steer clear of soufflés and pie crusts, anything that shouldn’t be attempted with a half-assed approach. I can’t apply nail polish for the life of me. When I lived alone, I occasionally had the electricity or phone turned off — not because I didn’t have the money to pay the bills, but simply because I was too disorganized to do it on time.

So this carpentry thing: it tests me.

Did you know that there are two sides of a pencil mark? There are, and when you’re cutting a board, you must make a clean slice on one side of the line or the other. Let the blade stray too close to the wrong side of the line, and your board won’t fit — it will either be too long, so you can’t jam it in to its intended space, no matter how much grunting and body weight you apply, or it will be too short – unable to meet the other boards.

My instructors understand this. To me, they are as skilled as surgeons, as exacting as engineers. Nothing is off, even by one-thirtysecond of an inch. Cuts are clean, angles are exact, boards fit squarely where they should.

“They have experience,” I tell myself. “They’ve been doing this for years.”

This is true, of course, but it is more than this. I imagine their linen closets, tidy and ordered, towels sorted by color and size, Motrin stored next to cough medicine, Bacitracin next to anti-fungal cream. I imagine their kitchens, and know instinctively that they don’t store one box of sugar above the coffeemaker, the other in the refrigerator, forcing them to tear through all their cabinets with frustration every time they want to sweeten a bowl of oatmeal.

I try. I do. I learn, for example, that the little metal piece at the tip of a tape measure moves in and out ever-so-slightly, an eighth of an inch, the width of the hook itself, allowing you to measure things accurately from both the inside and outside. I use this knowledge, carefully pressing against the hook when measuring something from the inside, pulling when measuring the outside.

I measure, then I measure again.

When measuring a board, the instructors and several of my more confident classmates make a single confident “crow’s foot” mark on a board, then draw a line straight through the point where the two lines meet. I am not so confident, so I make a series of crow’s feet, just to make sure, then try to draw a straight line through all of them. The line won’t go through all of the points, however. Which mark is correct? I pull out my tape measure and try again.

Sometimes, I think I’m doing okay. After constructing a wall, a classmate and I measure it to make sure it’s exact – we need 90-degree angles, precise lengths. To be sure, we measure the diagonals of the walls, ensuring that the distance between one corner and its opposite are the exact length of the other two.

When they are off by a quarter inch, we get out a sledgehammer — yes, this is what we are supposed to do — and we tap one corner, then another, until the diagonals are exact. It’s a lengthy process, and it involves measuring again and again. We do it until we get it right. After a long morning, we erect the wall and go to lunch, satisfied.

Then something happens. Maybe it happened when the wall went up, perhaps it’s got something to do with the wind bracing — a long metal strip we added diagonally across all the studs to keep the wall steady even during rough winds. But when we return from lunch, our instructors have taken our wall down. The wall is, they say, a full two inches longer on one side than on the other.

There is no fudging in carpentry. Make the window cuts too big, and you’ll have wind blowing through the sills. Make a piece of siding slightly too high, and your roof won’t sit squarely on the rafter. Cut a piece of crown molding at the wrong angle, and you’ll have a big ugly gap between your boards. “Good enough” might work in other areas of your life. Not here.

There are tricks and tools, of course. There are levels to make sure your boards are straight, there are speed squares to make sure that angles are exact. I learn to check my work, and I learn not to be too disappointed when it doesn’t quite work.

The instructors are patient. “It’s wood,” shrugs Lizabeth. “There’s always some way to make it work.”

By the end of the week, I’m a little more accurate. I spend an afternoon cutting boards to the same length. I line them up, and feel to see if they are flush. For the most part, they are.  A few are over, a few are under, so I set aside the ones that are too short — it hurts a little to think about the lumber I’m wasting — and trim the ones that are too long. Still, I can’t quite shake the feeling that I’m faking it, that other people cut straighter lines, that their boards fit exactly, precisely, squarely, every time.

I spend my final morning cutting siding for the exterior wall. A classmate and I spend well over an hour on single piece of siding. The board must be notched at both the top and bottom to make room for a rafter and a hook, and it needs a cut-out in the middle for a window. We measure, we cut, but we cannot make it fit. We trim, we notch, we cut more. Time passes. Lifetimes pass. We hold the same board, measuring, cutting, trimming.

And then. It is almost lunchtime, and finally, miraculously, it slips into place. The fit is beautiful, exact.  We high five one another and whoop.

As we are heading toward lunch, another classmate asks, “what did you work on this morning?” Over the course of the morning, she has created twenty-two strongbacks, angled support beams for the roof.

Perhaps I should feel some shame that after so long, I have only a single piece of siding to show for my efforts. But as I look at this notched piece of wood, fitting seamlessly into place, it occurs to me that for the first time in my life, perhaps a souffle is not out of the question.

I point to the board. “I did that,” I say. And I can’t help it: I grin.

***

Not done yet? Cool, ’cause neither am I:

Part V: Foul-mouthed beauties

Part VI: Coming Home

Part III of my Yestermorrow experience. I do go on, don’t I? Carry on: I’ll be done with this soon enough.

We look at tools. There are so many.

Take the hammer, for example. There are hammers with wooden handles, hammers with fiberglass handles, $90 hammers with  titanium handles. There are straight claws, curved claws. There are hammers with waffle-heads — don’t use those on trim work, mind you — and hammers of many different weights. If you’re going to frame a house, you want a heavier one, maybe 20 ounces. For smaller indoor projects, you’ll want something lighter; 14 ounces should do.

Patti and Lizabeth decode these tools for us. We learn about the speed square, a little metal triangle filled with notches and marks (useful for everything, it turns out. We will spend the week using the speed square to make sure boards are cut evenly, to draw lines for cutting, to measure angles). We begin to understand a tape measure; it is, I discover, marked in red at 16” intervals, because that is the distance between most wall studs. We learn that a nail set can be used to get a nail deeper than a hammer can, that a pipe clamp is the strongest kind, that a saw with higher teeth per inch delivers a finer cut, that a woman — yes, a woman — invented the circular saw.

And speaking of saws, there are so many: cross saw, coping saw, hack saw, compound miter saw, chop saw, band saw, jig saw. Each has a specific use, and I learn that I’ve tried to cut branches with a saw that is intended to cut metal, that our uneven laundry room door is such a mess because we used a saw that is intended for cutting curves.

(Later, I will go online looking for used saws for sale. During a Google search, I stumble upon a story about a woman who was badly injured after her partner placed a sex toy over a jig saw, an power tool with a blade that has a rapid up-and-down motion. The saw cut through the plastic toy, then through her body, and she was admitted to the hospital bleeding severely. She survived, but reading the story, I can’t help but think that none of this would have happened if the poor woman had taken but a single carpentry class).

There are tools, the instructors explain, that are works of art. They mention a line of Japanese chisels, each one made by a master blacksmith, the wooden handles hand-carved until the tool is a thing of beauty. It seems I’ve spent the last several years learning that there different levels of everything — from cheap factory-manufactured detritus, made to last only a short time, to refined artifacts, handmade by masters. I don’t know why I would have expected tools to be any different.

We oooh and ahhh over certain tools — the utility knife that allows a blade change without unscrewing, the Stanley tape that extends a full 11 feet before bending — and someone laughs that “it’s as if we’re looking at shoes, but it’s tools.”

I like this. I like knowing what to look for in an extension cord (a grounded one, with a heavier gauge, the shortest you need for the job, and preferably one that doesn’t get stiff in the cold). I like knowing that the numbers arranged in circular form around the head of a drill — numbers I’ve always ignored — allow you to adjust the torque, or power, of the drill, so you don’t accidentally strip a screw.

The first time the instructors hand me a circular saw, though, I’m stunned. It is so loud, so powerful, so unwieldy. I realize for the first time how dangerous this carpentry business can be. This machine could slice through anything: a piece of furniture, a leg, a small child. The circular saw doesn’t think, which is precisely what makes it so frightening. It is up to me to do the thinking.

I understand now why in previous classes, there have been students who didn’t want to use it at all, didn’t even attempt the circular saw until the last day of class.

My first cut with the circular saw is wobbly, and the resulting board is shorter at the top than the bottom. It is wildly imperfect. Still, I am relieved.

I didn’t chop my arm off. Or anyone else’s, for that matter.

***

Still reading? Well, you’re halfway there.

Part IV. Precision

Part V. Foul-Mouthed Beauties

Part VI. Coming Home

This is part two of the rather absurdly lengthy six-part series about my carpentry for women class at the Yestermorrow Design/Build School in Warren, Vermont. If you missed part I: Arriving, you’ll find it here.

There are nine of us in the class. In no particular order, we are:

• Jory, a school social worker from Vermont, a hiker and gardener, mother of a college-aged daughter.
• Ilona, a recent Smith graduate, former ultimate Frisbee player, student of an international boarding school, and classical guitarist, working now in an office job in the green economy in Washington DC.
• Donna, a nurse from Central Massachusetts, a motorcyclist, who dreams of building a home closer to her two grown sons.
• Alexis, a middle school art teacher and ceramicist who recently purchased five wooded acres of land in New Hampshire, where she plans to build her own timber-framed strawbale house.
• Theresa, a former financial executive from New Jersey, a single mother whose children have grown. The day after her youngest child got a job, she quit her corporate job working for real estate developers, to move to Philadelphia where she will study urban planning.
• Sarabel, a free-spirited employee of the Farm School in Western Massachusetts, a nonprofit that provides overnight, back-to-the-land experiences for children.
• Cindy, a retired diplomat of the United Nations, now splitting her time between Vermont and South Africa.
• Sasha, quiet, a 30-ish newlywed who works with youth, who is moving to a new city the day that class ends, and starting a new job two days later.

Then there is me: mother of two, wife of eleven years, semi-professional writer, striving to do more for myself.

I count the number of students who appear over 35, and under 30. The class seems split evenly — something that brings me no small relief.

We have two instructors, both professional women carpenters. Patti drives a silver Ford pick-up truck, is partial to Long Trail beer, and carries a guitar in a case emblazoned with bumper stickers, one of which says “Practice conscious acts of solidarity and organized resistance.” In her spare time, she rides motorcycles, plays folk festivals, has a radio show celebrating women’s music. She wears a scruffy T-shirt and a worn Yestermorrow baseball cap over her short hair. She stretches her muscled legs in front of her as she describes the 11-year process of building her own home.  At one point during the week, she will tell us she does, in fact, own both an iron and a blowdryer — both are in her wood shop, used exclusively for carpentry.

Lizabeth — there is no “E,” though I will spend the week stumbling over that — is direct and wry, a former Peace Corps volunteer, simultaneously petite and  rugged. Her long hair swept up casually, and she wears a T-shirt that says, “Don’t Panic: Go Organic.”  Lizabeth explains why she became a carpenter in a single, short sentence: “because my dad was a sexist.”

The two of them have taught together for years, and they share the easy banter of friends who have known each other a long time. As Lizabeth shows us her tool belt, she points to the place where she had to make extra notches in the leather so it fit her frame.

“They make these things pretty frickin’ big,” she says, heaving it up on her small waist.

Without missing a beat, Patti adds, “Yeah, it forces us to drink more beer.”

Some of the women have brought connections to their past. Cindy, the retired diplomat, carries an ancient hammer that her own father used. Patti shows us her favorite nail puller — a tile cutter that her own mother used in making mosaics. Sasha, the one about who will move to a new city in just a few days, brings photos of the home in upstate New York that her own parents built by hand. It is the home where she was married, she tells us, the place where she became herself.  Her parents divorced, and recently, her father sold it to a artist couple from New York City. She has dreamed of it nightly since.

What brings a inspires a woman to spend a week in Vermont, learning to build things out of wood? All of us have our specific reasons — a chicken coop that needs renovation; a charming Queen Anne Victorian home in Philadelphia that needs new cabinets, new floors, crown molding; an outdoor cob stove that needs a roof on a farm in western Massachusetts; a group of rammed-earth homes being constructed around permaculture farms in the semi-arid region of Memel, South Africa; a deck, a bookshelf; a home of one’s own. But surely we can obtain all of these things without knowing how to wield a hammer, so there is something else at work. That ’something else,’ I suspect, is a single, shared desire: independence, a sense that we don’t need to rely on others to achieve our goals.

We listen to the instructors explain the ins and outs of power tools, of a good measuring tape, of extension cords, of the speed square. Early in the week, we take notes. Some write in neat handwriting with light pencil marks. Others scribble in wild, lilting form, filling their pages with loose sketches.

At one point, while we are taking notes, I look at the group, and see a long semicircle of crossed legs — every one of us, with one leg over the other, dutiful students, ready to learn. By the end of the week, virtually all note-taking will have ceased; carpentry, it turns out, is best learned on the job.

***

Oh, there’s more. Try:

Part III. Power Tools

Part IV. Precision

Part V. Foul-Mouthed Beauties

Part VI. Coming Home

Recently, I did a week-long Carpentry for Women class at the Yestermorrow Design/Build School in Warren, Vermont. I sat down to try to write about it, to capture some of how it felt to be there, and what came out was far bigger than a blog post should ever, ever be. I wanted to do justice to the week, not say simply, “yeah, it was cool” (although it was). So I’ve chopped it up, and will post some of it here, in a series of six sections. Yes, six.   I don’t expect anyone to read it all. My mother will. The rest of you are free to go. But if you’re curious, here you are:

I am sitting alone at a picnic table. I clutch my knitting, pretending to concentrate on the needles and yarn. Already, in the few minutes I’ve been here, I have dropped a couple of stitches, even though the project I’m working on, an easy ribbed scarf, couldn’t be simpler.

Near me, a group of twenty-somethings plays hackysack. Others sprawl casually over the lawn, drinking beer out of mismatched glasses. One guy strums a guitar. I’m trying not to look too closely at anyone, but I swear I just saw a man walk by wearing a T-shirt with an image of a massive Hummer, beneath which are the words, “Sorry ‘bout your penis.”

Someone offers me a glass of wine, and I nod, gratefully.

“Yes, please,” I gulp. I feel out of place. I feel old.

It’s the evening of my welcome dinner at Yestermorrow Design/Build School, which for 25 years has taught sustainable design to both amateurs and professionals. I’m here to take an introductory Carpentry for Women class, something I signed up for many months ago when it didn’t seem real.

Suddenly tonight, after I kissed my children goodbye and got in the car, it became real, and I felt terrified.

Yestermorrow sits by the side of Route 100, a two-lane country highway that runs through the Mad River Valley, some of the loveliest, most pastoral landscape Vermont has to offer. The 38-campus is beautiful, filled with forest and field, wildflowers and mountain vistas.

Nearby, I see a stone wall curving gracefully into an arch — the evidence of a stonework class. Across the field, chickens peck beside a homemade chicken coop next to a garden filled with organic bounty. In one direction, I see a bench made from bent wood, in another, a solar shower and composting toilet. There are fluid cob garden walls, straw bale cabins, earthen ovens, and a tree house that is the stuff of any child’s fantasy — enormous and round, with a cedar shingles, cathedral-type ceilings, spacious enough to accommodate an entire classroom of little ones. These are only the things that remain on campus, of course; throughout Vermont, there are boathouses, concert bandstands, children’s playgrounds, timber-framed homes, green roofs, garden sheds, and buildings to make cheese. All of them made by hand by Yestermorrow students, interns, and staff.

Sitting here, I am intensely aware that the question will arise at some point, “why did you decide to take this class?” For the moment, the best answer I have is this: because I don’t know how to do anything.

That’s not entirely true, of course. Once upon a time — a million years ago, it seems — I learned stuff that was mostly useful under the harsh fluorescent lights of the modern-day office. I became master of the press release, the flow chart, the well-placed bullet point.  In recent years, though, I’ve left that behind, with no small amount of relief. Since then, I have been trying to learn practical things, the skills one never gets to learn in a cubicle. The fact that I’m holding a piece of knitting, even this simple scarf, is evidence of that I’ve had some success. I’ve learned other things, too: I can make a batch of yogurt from scratch. I can build a fire in my wood stove. I can grow tomatoes in a container. I have made my own all-purpose cleaner for the home, and this spring, I began learning to use an axe on saplings.

Sure, I can do some things. But it’s already clear that people here — these people who look so young — know how to do so much more.

Watching these people from the corner of my eye — people who look like they’ve never given much of a thought to children’s schedules, to preschool dropoffs, to family meals, gymnastics classes, pediatrician’s appointments, toddler toothpaste, or the other mundane business of family life — I realize, I should have come here years ago. I should have come here, done something like this, after college, back when I was busy pursuing jobs in high-rise buildings.

I could have been like these others, once. I would have loved it. So I am also thinking this: I missed my chance.

Dinner is ready. I put down my knitting, sip my a glass of wine, eat a hearty dinner on a chipped plate. I sit next to a friendly, 40-something woman from New Jersey with a thick Long Island accent, who describes her work with real estate developers — work that she recently resigned. I am unreasonably grateful to find someone who talks more easily than I.

After we eat, the Women’s Carpentry class adjourns to the library for our first meeting. We introduce ourselves, examine a sketch for the project we will build: an outdoor shed, made from rough-hewn Vermont wood. It will be used to store batteries for windpower. We flip through handouts; words like “balustrade” and “flashing” and “quarter-sawn” swim before my eyes.

Here is something I know: that not far away, in a hotel just down the road, two little girls are being tucked into beds. One, I am certain, is lying on her belly, a ratty stuffed duck tucked tightly under her arm; the other is probably twirling a wisp of hair around her tiny finger as she drifts off to sleep, her back rising and falling slowly with each breath. That is the world I know: those children, that routine. Here, in this school in the woods, surrounded by adults who build things, I am wholly out of my element.

As my fellow classmates talk, I find myself mesmerized by the bookshelves that surround us. The shelves cover three walls of the library, floor to ceiling, and are handmade from thick golden pieces of maple. They are stained with warm honey hues, and they are beautiful. Someone made these.

I remind myself that whoever did surely wasn’t put on earth knowing how to build shelves. They learned. Maybe, just maybe, I can learn something like this, too.

***

Want more? (hi, Mom!). Check Out:

Part II. Who We Are

Part III. On Tools

Part IV. Precision

Part V. Foul-Mouthed Beauties

Part VI. Coming Home

More thoughts on caprentry…and on Vermont…and on my sunburned shoulders…and on my blisters…and on power tools…and on the kind of woman that chooses to spend a week’s vacation in the woods, swinging a hammer and cursing like a sailor. More of all of that to come. For the moment, though, I offer this photo, of a not-quite-complete shed that I helped build — me! —  and that was built entirely by people without a Y chromosome.

Great week, folks. Great, amazing, exhausting, badass kind of week.

Women made this. I made this.

Anyone out there remember a million years ago, when out of the blue, I signed up for a week-long women’s carpentry class? And then months came and went and you never heard a word, not one single word, about the class, or about wood, or about the difference between a circular saw and a jig saw?

Well, all of that’s about to change. Because class begins tomorrow.

Tomorrow.

It’s not quite the getaway I’d originally planned; the week turned into a semi-family vacation. We’re all staying together. Then during the day, the girls will enjoy “Camp Daddy,” while Mom’s nose gets tickled by the smell of sawdust. This means I will miss the family pilgrimage to the Ben and Jerry’s ice cream factory. Ice cream? Who has time? I will be busy with joists and stiles and girders and trusses, and no, I have no idea what any of these things mean. Honestly, I don’t. But talk to me this time next week, and I will.

We arrived in the area last night, and spent the day knocking around Waitsfield, Vermont, getting a sense of the place. It’s funny; we haven’t left our home state, and yet it is as if we have come to a different planet altogether. My own Vermont is one of camouflage and hunting knives, pickups and Budweiser cans. In my Vermont, one’s neighbor might hold an annual lawn sale where the only items for sale, literally, are guns. In my Vermont, if a snowstorm knocks a tree in the road, your average 50-something woman simply straps on a chainsaw and takes care of that nonsense in  minutes. In my Vermont, there are more ATVs than bicycles, one might find a moose meandering through the yard during an evening rainstorm, the physician who treated your child’s ear infection might well have raised the eggs you ate at breakfast, and at some point, your kids are sure to wander in from outside saying, nonchalantly, “Must be turkey season, Mom; there are tons of gunshots out there. In my Vermont, someone might name a lamb after your child, then a few weeks later say, “oh, we decided to slaughter that one. You want the some of the meat?”

(and in my Vermont, you do).

I like my Vermont. It is a weird and wonderful place, filled with good people who never, ever put on airs.

I like this Vermont, too. It’s just different from what I’ve gotten used to. The simplest way to describe it might be this: less camouflage, more peace signs.

We headed to the farmer’s market today, and were amazed by how many vendors were there:

Okay, so it doesn't look quite so impressive in the photo. But this is just one tiny corner of it. A prize for the first person who can pick Blair and Merrie out of the crowd.

In addition to the standard lettuce/tomatoes/berries/garlic, vendors also sold samosas, gourmet lemonade, hand-thrown pottery, hand-blown glass, hand-knit apparrel, hand-dyed tie-dyes, hand-made furnture, as well as slate garden markers, soaps made from honey, watercolor paintings, artisanal cheeses, and so, so much more.

There was wool:

Mmm. Wool.

And yak meat. Yes, I said yak meat.

Yak meat is apparently leaner than beef, more flavorful than buffalo.

The gal who sold hand-printed t-shirts and baby onesies wore my own favorite footwear:

I am serious when I say I love big plastic black boots, especially with shorts and knee socks.

There were booths where children could make prints out of cut vegetables:

My girls made the two in the upper right corner.

Naturally, they painted their fingers in the process:

Everywhere, there were artists and crafters. Perhaps that’s because there’s a month-long festival going on:

Or, who knows, maybe it’s just this corner of Vermont. At any rate, there are gazillion opportunities to purchase locally-made art. Beyond the farmers’ market, there are galleries like this one:

I admit it: I am a complete sucker for stores like this one.

And wandering down the street, Merrie was invited to throw a pot on an artists’ potters’ wheel:

Sadly, the whole thing collapsed shortly after this moment. It became a tiny saucer.

In the local coffee shop, we found not just good coffee, but also many colorful messages of harmony:

I like harmony. I like the arts. I like wool, and I’d probably like yak meat if I’d been able to try it. If you ask me, this is a great place to spend the week.

And tomorrow: carpentry. My goals include:

1. Learn enough about tools to pull together a decent set from Craigslist and yard sales.

2. Get enough know-how to do simple repairs and renovations around the house (crown moldings, deck repair, that sort of thing).

3. Keep all my fingers, toes, and limbs

Wish me luck, will you? And I will keep you posted.

You’ve probably seen it already. Or if you haven’t, by now there’s probably some reason why. Perhaps you’re weary, weary of talking about industrialized food, weary of all that talk.

I actually wasn’t planning to post about Food Inc., the sweeping documentary about our industrialized food industry that made Michael Ruhlman cry and that Consumerist said “will make you fear your next meal.”  More than that: I wasn’t all that enthusiastic to see it. It’s not that I don’t know the subject is an important one. I just sort of doubted that the film would take me anywhere beyond the discussions that so many of us have already had.

The truth is, it often feels like those of us who care about sustainability, about food, about health, just keep rehashing the same old stuff: consolidation of industry mechanization of agriculture pesticides GMOs land-use living wages food safety subsidies obesity diabetes Michael Pollan Monsanto buy local cook more know your food, grow your own. We say it, then we say it again. We say it with urgency, with intensity. Then we shout it. Then we say it yet again, perhaps by now in a drained monotone, follwed by a heavy sigh.

We say these things, and still income is the number one predictor of lifestyle diseases, still the children sit slack-jawed before the ads for Cocoa Puffs, still E. Coli-tainted beef takes American lives. Or worse: we stop saying any of these things, and we retreat into the world that feels most comfortable. We place locally-grown heirloom tomatoes into canvas tote bags at the farmers’ market, while debating the relative merits of the brandywine tomato vs. the black plum variety. Then later, over dinner, we slurp up our fresh mozarella salads while rolling our eyes about anyone who would buy a Big Mac.

We talk to each other, the same ready audience every time, and we never fail to repeat ourselves. No wonder people want to throw kale at our heads.

Honestly, I suspect that’s part of why I lost my blogging mojo recently. At a certain point, it all begins to feel like you’re merely droning on. And, frankly, that’s what I was expecting from Food Inc: more of the same messages, more the stuff that I already knew, that anyone who reads this blog probably already knows. More of the stuff that we have seen and read before, and the stuff that never, ever seems to change anything.

Still, Food Inc. had come to town, and I couldn’t not see it.

The film was playing in an arts theater that serves organic popcorn and fair trade coffee and proudly proclaims its concession stand “free of high fructose corn syrup.” The local co-op was on-hand, serving up free samples of local bread with local butter, homemade cookies from whole ingredients. Around me in the theater were the many of the same folks I see at CSA pickup every week: good people, but highly educated, almost enterly white, college-town types with disposable income. I sighed. Here we go.

Then the film opened. And you know what? It actually took me somewhere new.

Yes, it was all the same stuff we have talked about before: factories pushing out tens of thousands of corn-based products, the hidden costs of cheap food, the unintended consequences of large-scale industrialization. There was the bankrupting of family farmers, there was food-borne illness. There were GMOs and land use issues and subsidies and the revolving door at the FDA. There was the obesity crisis. Diabetes. And there were the food companies — Tyson, Smithfield, Purdue, Monsanto — who declined, one after another, to be interviewed about any of these issues. (and there was, too, of course, Joel Salatin, celebrity farmer of Omnivore’s Dilemma fame). Yep, it was all there, all of it.

But it had something else, something that’s too often missing from the discussion: it had stories. Real stories, from real people. There was Barbara Kowalcyk, a mother who watched her healthy, vibrant 2-year old son die a grueling death simply because he ate a hamburger in America. The filmmakers follow Kowalcyk on her tireless quest to authorize the USDA to shut down any food manufacturing plant with repeated health code violations. There was Carole Morison, a chicken farmer who had produced chickens for Perdue, until she finally spoke out against the company for requiring farmers to go deep into debt in exchange for diminishing returns (they cancelled her contract). There was the Orozco family, a hard-working Latino family whose foray into the grocery store produce section illuminated the sad logic behind their decision to eat fast food. They can’t afford broccoli, they can’t afford pears. But a fast food meal eaten on the run: this they can do.

There are other stories that get told along the way, other characters that emerge. The filmmakers went far beyond the farmer’s market bubble, introducing us to the individuals — growers, workers, eaters — that many of us who care about food don’t generally meet in the course of our days.

Against these stories, these human faces, were other images: a labyrinthine factory complex, metallic and beastly, pushing out  its products (our food) with exacting assembly-line motions. A supermarket aisle, thousands of technicolor packages eerily flanking a gleaming white floor. These shots were beautiful — I mean, really, genuinely aesthetically beautiful — and in the context of the story, wholly grotesque.

The story of food is not an easy one to tell; our food system involves a dizzying number of issues. It is where E. coli meets human rights, where animal diets meets land use, where diabetes meets cattle rumen. It is a confusing landscape, one that does not lend itself to easy soundbites, and yet filmmakers were able to put together the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle effectively, telling a story that was at once comprehensive and comprehensible in a mere 94 minutes.

Sitting there in the theater, munching on my (organic) popcorn and my (high fructose corn syrup-free) candy, I didn’t feel like I was watching the same old, same old. I felt like I was meeting new people, getting to know some new faces for a change. And I began to believe, for the first time, that a film about food could reach an audience that extends beyond a bunch of Michael Pollan-reading foodies.

After leaving the theater, I spoke with a friend, a CSA member, buy-local type. When I asked her if she’d seen the film she shurgged.

“Nah,” she said. “I sorta’ feel like I read the book already.”

“True,” I said. “But this is the movie. And seriously: it’s pretty good.”