“A builder needs proper tools.”

And I stood in that sitting room and felt my shoulders come down about an inch for the first time in ten years.

Dinner was the good silver and the plates with the blue birds on them that I ate off as a child.

Thaddeus asked Silas about a footstool he had built and Silas said it was cherry with mortise-and-tenon joints and my father said, “No nails?” and Silas said no sir, and Thaddeus said, “That’s the old way.

The sturdy way,” and there was a spark in his eye that I had not seen since about 1991.