People bring me pieces that have been damaged, or neglected, or nearly ruined — a chair with a shattered joint, a desk with a cracked and water-stained top, a hundred-year-old thing that someone had given up on — and I take them apart, gently, and I mend what can be mended and reinforce what has gone weak, and I sand away the ruin and bring the grain back up, and I give them back whole.

I did not choose this work by accident.

Every piece I repair is the same quiet lesson, told again with my hands: that what is broken can be made whole.

That the mending, done with care, often leaves the thing stronger at the seam than it was before it broke.

My left leg carries a long thin scar down its side, and it aches sometimes when the weather turns, and it is, I have come to feel, a little like the furniture I repair — broken once, badly, and then healed, and standing now, and strong.

One afternoon my mother came into the workshop with coffee and stood looking at a mahogany writing desk I’d spent three weeks bringing back from ruin, and she said the client was going to weep when she saw it.