Although I’ve been a property owner in NC for over thirty years, I’m not a native. Rather, I’m a native of New York State and still own a lakefront cottage in the Adirondacks. Since I’ve been to almost every other State, I’ll be so bold to say that the natural resource and beauty in NYS are unsurpassed in the US. Regretfully, its politics (and economics) are among the worst in the country. That’s why my main home is in coastal NC, but our summer cottage is in the Adirondacks (watch this short video) — an ideal tradeoff.
We like NC for many reasons, and have assimilated its interesting diversity from hundreds of miles of coast to Appalachian mountains. To better get to know our new home, we subscribed to Our State magazine quite a while ago. Over the years I’ve subscribe to well over a hundred magazines, and this is definitely one of the very best. Despite my having limited time, I literally read every monthly edition from cover to cover. All of the articles are either good or great.
I’m sharing a random sample here. The author is Drew Perry, who I do not know. If you have any interest in NC (or the South) please subscribe…
——————————————————————————————————————————
The maul’s not fancy.
It’s a garden-variety big-box-store maul, straight wooden handle, probably hickory or ash. I exploded that handle last fall, shattering it while I was trying to split some of the bigger stuff my wood guy brings me because he knows I like to split stuff. The maul was gifted to me for the same reason: Our dear friends Nina and John used to come hang out in my writing shed, where I have a woodstove, and they would watch me try to split firewood with my dad’s old Boy Scout hatchet. More accurately, they’d laugh at me.
And then one year for my birthday — 10 years ago, maybe more — they gave me the maul. Part gag gift, but only part. They knew I’d love it, knew I’d use it. And I did, every winter, and sometimes in the summer, too, accounting for storms and deadfall and the occasional round or three I’d take from a neighbor who’d leave a cut tree at the curb.
High sentimental value, in other words.
Those writing shed nights were magical. We met John and Nina because their kids were one clothes cycle older than ours, and they once left a bag of the shirts and pants their kids outgrew on our porch. We invited them over for drinks to thank them, and I don’t think it’s inaccurate to say we fell in love. My wife and I even joked after the first time they left: Is it too soon to text them, see if they want to get together again?
It was not; they did; we all did, often in the writing shed, stove blazing and the double doors cracked to let the cool night in and music on the hi-fi and martinis and the same sampler pack of cookies every time. In the corner: dueling baby monitors, so we could hear if ours were asleep in the house, and they could see if theirs were asleep a block away. We were hiding from being who we were, from our houses, from our small children, from everyone in the world who was not us.
We vacationed together. We ate dinner together two or three times a month. We hung out on porches. Nina and Tita, my wife, became closer than sisters. And then Nina got sick.
There’s so much more ‘and then’ here, but the quickest version is that finally she did not get better. She died of cancer at 39, the mother of two boys barely older than ours. She was a comet. She was kind. She was wickedly, impossibly smart and funny. She liked to get the neighborhood together to sing Springsteen songs. She liked to sit in my writing shed and get a little tipsy and dance with John while Tita and I danced across the room. We loved them. We love them both still.
• • •
I assumed repairing the maul would be simple: Go to the big box, buy a handle, spend an afternoon undoing and redoing.
None of the replacement handles I could find would fit the maul. It was immediately clear I did not know what I was doing. Nina, by the way, would’ve loved this.
I’m not sure why I didn’t call either of my two local hardware stores. Maybe I understood that it needed to be a quest, that though Nina’s been gone eight years, this would be a means to grieve in a way I hadn’t yet, and possibly needed to. And while I’m not a big ghost guy, I do believe, in a hazy way, in the presence of people we lose, in much the same way that I believe stories exist on a plane that’s also off the page.
So it’s not a stretch to say that she was with me in some way as I hit dead end after dead end, and with me, too, when I found the Facebook listing for a gorgeous vintage Craftsman axe, red painted accents and highly polished steel, beautiful handle. Yes, Wicked Iron Resurrections messaged back, they were, in fact, in the business of axe restoration, and yes, they could rehang my maul.
Nina would have loved that Warren Lenehan and Courtney Ridings are bonded such that he struggles to sell any of the axes that Ridings has helped restore. She would have loved that they live in a 140-year-old house in Ronda, near Elkin, and that the back bedroom is so full of axes and tomahawks and hatchets that one’s first thought is of a museum. She would have loved that Lenehan’s knowledge of axe and tomahawk history stretches well past the encyclopedic. She would have loved Ridings shrugging when she said: “I just like to make ugly things pretty and make things sharp. If I’m mad, I like to tear things up.”
Nina would have loved, too, the pair’s passion for the act of restoration itself, for finding old tools and putting them back into use. Ridings is more on the restoration of axe heads; Lenehan makes the handles. Mine, he says, will be hickory sourced not much more than 10 miles from his house, from a guy he’s got down in Roaring River. It will be made, I’m sure I hear him say, in something called “coffin octagonal style,” and Nina would have delighted in that dark joke.
Would I like the new handle to be painted red to match the red vinyl sheath of the original?
I’ve known since I found Wicked Iron: I’m leaving this one to the universe. Whatever handle comes back is the one that needs to come back. I tell Lenehan and Ridings that I trust literally any choice they’d like to make. OK, they say. We’ll let you know when it’s ready…
• • •
I pick up the finished maul at an exit near Kernersville: Lenehan has been so kind as to bring it most of the way to me. There it is in the back seat of his truck, and it’s so much more than I’d hoped: It’s stunning. It’s a work of art. It smells like oil and metal and wood. I cry a little in the parking lot, and cry off and on driving home, Springsteen on the radio. Nina, I think. I did something a little wild. I asked for a miracle, and I got it.
The handle is Shagbark Hickory, Lenehan tells me. The bottom is painted red; a painted handle is historically used to identify tools. The gunmetal accent stripe is just an accent. The bit is polished and sharpened and in far better shape than it ever was before. The eye gave him a bit of trouble, but he worked around it, and everything’s solid. The handle is just octagonal style, not coffin — coffin is a term from the late 1800s, not much in use anymore. I’m going to keep thinking of it that way, though, I decide.
John moved to Boston a couple of years ago, but he comes back through Greensboro from time to time. By the next time I see him, I’ll have been brave enough to start using the restored maul, and we’ll sit by the firepit or the woodstove in the shed. We’ll put some music on, watch the fire, and remember Nina, who would have loved the idea of finding two people in Wilkes County to restore a maul that I could have far more easily replaced. This was not the sort of thing to be done easily, she would have known. This was the sort of thing to be done right. I just never dreamed how right it could be.
Perry teaches writing at Elon University. His first novel, This Is Just Exactly Like You, was a finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan prize from the Center for Fiction, a Best-of-the-Year pick from The Atlanta Journal Constitution and a SIBA Okra pick. His second, Kids These Days, was an Amazon Best-of-the-Month pick and was named to Kirkus Reviews ‘Winter’s Best Bets’ and ‘Books So Funny You’re Guaranteed to Laugh’ lists.
Again, here is the original article, which also includes some nice pictures…
Leave a comment
Share
Thanks for reading Critically Thinking About Select Societal Issues! Please pass a link to this article on to other associates who might benefit. They can subscribe for FREE to receive new posts (typically about twice a week.
Here is other information from this scientist that you might find interesting:
I offer incentives for you to sign up new subscribers!
I also consider reader submissions on Critical Thinking about my topics of interest.
My commentaries are my opinion about the material discussed therein, based on the information I have. If any readers have different information, please share it. If it is credible, I will be glad to reconsider my position.
Check out the Archives of this Critical Thinking substack.
C19Science.info is my one-page website that covers the lack of genuine Science behind our COVID-19 policies.
Election-Integrity.info is my one-page website that lists multiple major reports on the election integrity issue.
WiseEnergy.org is my multi-page website that discusses the Science (or lack thereof) behind our energy options.
Media Balance Newsletter: a free, twice-a-month newsletter that covers what the mainstream media does not do, on issues from climate to COVID, elections to education, renewables to religion, etc. Here are the Newsletter’s 2025 Archives. Please send me an email to get your free copy. When emailing me, please make sure to include your full name and the state where you live. (Of course, you can cancel the Media Balance Newsletter at any time - but why would you?
