Our comedy of errors

It started out as a small project, the way many things do for us. I planted green beans in the garden and the dowels I used for years to support them were in bad shape. My husband, never one to shrink from a project, decided dowels were inadequate, so off he went to the store to buy some planed lumber he could cut into sticks for the garden.

He wasn’t gone long so I wasn’t surprised when he returned without the wood. “You wouldn’t believe what they were charging for a few short pieces of planed lumber. I’m going to the sawmill to get a few pieces,” he said. “Come with me?” The sawmill was half an hour away. 

So, not wanting to miss an adventure, I agreed and within minutes was whisked away to Richmond, west of Summerside. There we stopped at a Handy Andy hardware store for directions to the sawmill. “You can’t miss it, about 700 meters up the road,” reported the clerk when asked about the sawmill. Meanwhile, my husband was distracted by the stock in the store.

“There’s one item of everything from a needle to an anchor in there,” he reported as he returned to the car. “I have to come back here one day,” he added. I thought about the return visit and the untold nuts and bolts which would be added to the supplies in our garage which is already chinched as Newfoundlanders say. We headed west.

Before long, we saw the sign for the sawmill and turned into the driveway where potholes were filled with water from the latest thunderstorm. The bottom of the car hit in a pothole. Oops! “Wonder what was damaged?” he queried as he exited the car and went into the store. There wasn’t a sawmill in sight.

Outside the store a lumberjack stood guard. He kept a silent vigil and could have been a good lumberjack but I didn’t hold out much hope for wood cut with that axe.

Out came my husband with directions to the sawmill, “Further along the road, take the first left,” he said. We left the driveway carefully so as not to do any more damage to the car. As we drove along we listened for problems and reminisced about Handy Andy stores which our fathers frequented when we were children. We hadn’t seen one in fifty years or more.

Eventually we found an exit left and drove and drove. Ten minutes later, right turn and soon the sawmill appeared in the distance.

A clerk showed my husband some pieces of board which would normally have been discarded but now were his, without charge. That price was right. Half an hour later we were home and soon, he was cutting the strips with the circular saw.

Now you would think the story ends there, however, you’d be wrong. Rarely does my husband do a project without drawing blood from some appendage. Knowing that the circular saw was involved I had said, “Don’t lop off any fingers.” Emergencies involving blood make me weak in the knees.

Well, twenty minutes later he came from the garage, blood dripping from his thumb. It was a close call though the thumb was still there. The flesh on his thumb was mangled and it took some time to stop the bleeding. A week later, it still hurts him to do anything with that hand. Who knew your thumb was involved in so much hand function?

We saved forty dollars on sticks.