Tools and Tales

May 7, 2024

Beloved:

I was buying some lengths of PVC pipe and asked the cashier if she knew the best way to cut them.  Ron, another Habitat Restore volunteer, overheard and offered to help.  He sold me a hacksaw for $1.50 and explained how to use it and how to replace the blade.  Here’s a picture of my new container garden, in the only sunny spot of my little yard.

Yesterday I got really ambitious and wondered if I could cut the dead half of a serviceberry tree.  Yes, as it turns out, and I didn’t even hurt myself.  I still need to cut up the base branch into some manageable lengths, but turns out I am an entirely left-handed sawyer, so it takes me a minute to get through a log thick as the fat end of a baseball bat.

The better part of that tiny tale is not that I can cut down the dead half of a tree but, rather, the amazing efficacy of a sturdy old hacksaw.  The handle is wrapped in duct tape.  The blade needs replaced, according to Ron, and will definitely cost more than the saw did.  Yet it went through that wood more easily than a table knife through cold butter.  I did a quick search and learned this: “. . . the modern hacksaw owes a great deal to Max Flower-Nash Clemson.  He conducted a series of experiments in the 1880s looking at ways to increase the efficiency of saw blades via heat treatments and by changing the size and number of embedded teeth.  He was eventually granted an official patent for his improvements.”

Which got me to thinking about tools in general:  the tackle of our everyday lives so embedded in our routines we only notice them when they skip or fail.  Utensils, gadgets and machines; from irons to airplanes, even baby bottles, constantly being reengineered to do what they do better.  Max Flower-Nash Clemson (I’m itching to know how he got that name!) needed a better saw for cutting metal, so he built one with wavy teeth, which turned out to cut plastic better than anything on the market.  On the push instead of on the pull, which was also kind of revolutionary too, apparently.

Behind it all, an ingenuity we are quick to consider human, but is present throughout creation.  An orangutan chewed a plant and rubbed the medicine paste on his own nasty facial wound.  It healed completely within a month and left me in the same place I so often am ~ the land of amazement ~ at the wonder of it all.  People, plants and animals channeling the wisdom of the Creator within our own construction, rearranging elements to suit whatever needs arise along the course of our existence.  To say the least, amazing.  An invitation out the door into the yard.  Lay a string around a patch of grass and see what goes on within its border.  Grab a magnifying glass and look some more.  A whole universe beneath our shoes.  I can barely stand it.  I pray this glorious day finds you heart and hands to the tasks that give your life meaning. 

~ peace & prayers, 
pastor annette