You wouldn’t think it if you were watching from a distance this old man cutting rafters for the roof of his barn, but that’s the kind of thing running through his mind. I’ve noticed, I muse, that while I can curl my right thumb and middle finger around my left wrist and touch the tips together, I can’t come even close on the other wrist. And what’ll a forensics expert make of all the titanium, Tupperware, and ceramic material farther down on my body? Maybe I should forgo cremation and instead give some young scientist of the distant future, probing through ancient graveyards with an anomaly detector, the chance of a fascinating find.

Cutting rafters – at least very many of them – is pretty dull work. Getting them just the right length is the only exciting part of the whole operation. Without going into too many boring details, just figuring the exact right length isn’t, as Robert Frost says, “Button, button, who’s got the button?” The old-timers used, appropriately, a rafter square. I can do that, but I’m too fussy to trust the result; so I use a calculator. This particular job is almost too easy. It’s a 9/12-pitch roof; the rafters rise nine inches for every foot of “run,” or horizontal space they cover. If you’re into parlor mathematics, you can calculate that each rafter is therefore 15 inches long for each foot of run. So my 28-foot-wide building takes rafters exactly 17.5 feet long – minus three-quarters of an inch (half thell's Funeral thickness of the ridge plank) plus half an inch (the thickness of the sheathing). The chance of making a mistake and ruining two 18-foot rafters can make a penurious old guy nervous. So I cut two of them, lugged them upstairs, and laid them out flat as they would be when vertical. Perfect! Gratified and relieved, I carried one back down for a pattern and went to work.

I’ve sited the barn – a big garage, really – to catch the first rays of the morning sun at midwinter. Here at midsummer, the sun rises behind thicker, taller trees and doesn’t hit the spot where I’m working till almost ten. After that, it’s either too hot or too bright. Bright sun casts “hard” shadows. If I face in a wrong direction, even the shadow of a square laid on a board obscures my mark; and the shadow of a circular saw hides it even more. Eye pupils shut down to a pinpoint from the reflection off the lumber. After a few minutes of wrestling with those problems, it’s easy to remember some work that needs doing down in the cool cellar.

It may be impossible to describe satisfactorily the pure tactile joy of carpentry, except to those who already know it from their own experience. ‘Way back before the Second World War, a couple of friends and I set up our carpenter shop on the wooden cover of a coal chute on Lancaster Street in Albany, New York. We had three tools: a pair of pliers, a small hand saw, and a 10-inch pipe wrench, which served as our hammer. We made mostly stern-wheel paddleboats, using big rubber bands from my grandfather’s pharmacy to power the wheels; but because of limitations of size we never could coax more than a few seconds of powered navigation out of our creations.

Then in the Fifties I had the chance to work on Adirondack leantos and log buildings with a crew of old-timers, and my learning curve climbed steeply. Their tools seemed a part of their arthritic hands; shavings fell clean from their work; they cursed an errant hammer blow that left “French dressing” beside a nail. “This may look simple,” Bill Broe said to me as he planed a door, “but all of us work right at our limit at everything we do. That’s why we leave our names somewhere in everything we build” Thinking of them, I often paraphrase the 144th Psalm: Blessed be the old guys who taught my hands to work, and my fingers to feel the beauty in the wood.

About three in the afternoon, the sun dips behind the spruces to the west of the barn, and it’s cool enough again to work out there. The robin nesting over one of the doors flees squawking at my approach in spite of my assurances. It’s been a while since I’ve been able to do physical work, and my gait is still pretty lopsided; but as I move along the top of the side walls above the second floor, marking the location of each of the 38 rafters, and nailing the plywood wall sheathing in tight so the rafters will fit snugly, I realize that I’m not thinking about walking. I’m wondering if I can save some money by setting the rafters by myself one more time. I did it on my last house, and those rafters were bigger and heavier than these; the peak was higher in the air, too. But that was 24 years ago, and time and injury have wrought changes that aren’t going away no matter how hard I work out at the gym. I’ll just get everything ready and try to get a crew over here for a couple of days. I hope they know how to shrink or stretch a rafter with a 16-penny toenail, because I don’t want to insult them (Vermont carpenters are easily insulted) by asking if they do.

The afternoon light turns gold. I’m looking down on the roof of our house and over the ridge to the east toward Spruce Mountain. The old familiar weight of my leather apron hangs on my shoulders, my hammer bumping against my knee on one side. God, I’m going to hate having to give this up someday! Guess I’ll write my name up near the peak of a rafter and call it a day.