Part Seventeen: Nineteen Years, Briefly

I am going to do the eighteen years between 2007 and 2024 in one part, because they are not the story and because they were, in most ways, good.

We were poor and then we were not quite poor.

The shop came back.

Porches, decks, stair rails, kitchen carcasses, four churches’ worth of pews and lecterns, and from about 2012 a steady trade in cedar chests that I shipped as far as Kansas.

In 2014 I took a half-time post teaching the vocational woodshop at the high school, which paid eighteen thousand a year with a benefits package and which is the reason Silas has teeth.