Ax Handles
By Alma Robison Highee
All his whole life through he had loved the heft
Of smooth peeled hickory, and when his son
Sold the small farm they owned, he was bereft
Of all that he held dear; he took but one
Loved thing from home, a cut of hickory wood.
Prisoned in city walls, he tried to please,
But son and daughter never understood
How he hated the life of utter ease.
He sat alone and watched the slow days pass,
But in his narrow room he learned to lose
Himself with pocketknife and piece of glass,
Shaping ax handles that he would never use.
Far removed from orchards, fences, and pasture bars,
He still remembered meadows, hills, and stars.
(1954)
This sounds like my grandfather. A farmer all his life, he was talked into going to Southern California by his daughter. Two years was all he could stand. He went back home to St. George (his son had not sold the farm!) and was able to help work the farm until just a couple of years before his death at age 98.
I like that, YAJohn. We should all love our work so well.
Simpler times 🙂
One of the ancestral journals we have been transcribing makes frequent references to helving axes and stoking pitchforks.
I don’t know if they talked about urbanization in the 1950’s as much as today, but this poem beautifully captures the feelings of an elderly man toward this process.
True story. When Sandra and I lived in Washington DC in the early 2000s, I home-taught (with Sandra as my ‘companion’) Sis. Maren Hardy, an elderly (but very sharp) widow in the ward. Her late husband, Ralph, had been a missionary companion with Gordon B. Hinckley during their missions in England, and so she knew Pres. & Sis. Hinckley quite well (she always referred to Pres. Hinckley as “Gordo”, which I found endearing, if a bit unnerving).
Anyone, on one our our visits with Sis. Hardy, she told us of having traveled on one occasion out to Salt Lake City for conference and going to visit Pres. and Sis. Hinckley in their new apartment near the Church Office Building. Age and duty had finally compelled the Hinckleys to move from the home where they had lived for so many decades and which Pres. Hinckley had spent so much time remodeling and expanding (if you’ve read his biography, you know what I mean). She said that Pres. Hinckley was showing her around the apartment and then, with a smile on his face, motioned her over to a closet door. When she got there, he opened it up. Inside, neatly arranged and thoroughly organized, were all his old tools and equipment. He had to leave the house behind, but he insisted on keeping close the tools he had worked with throughout his life.