A Short Story

I know of a wooden plough plane that has been in use for a hundred years if not more, and has never rested from being used for ploughing and creating grooves in every kind of wood, with curvy shavings like springs of wood spilling from its throat. The man that used it last left this earth a long time ago, and everyone who knew him through those years has also died and left the benches where they were in the workshops as an unfinished work in progress because the story can't be finished.

A work of art in a lived life of a maker. It is doubtful, very doubtful, that we will ever see a well used and well-worn plough plane like this from a man that used it throughout his life again. I am supposing that this plough plane made 10,000 linear feet of grooving in the man's lifetime. But of course, we will never know.

Most things of an important nature, like a plough plane left unused on a workbench, have you noticed, lack a certain look of completion? A lack of neatness even, as though there is more yet to do. More enjoyably good though, anyway, if you think about it, is to remember that man using the plough plane bathed in the pleasure of still using the plough plane throughout his long life making as if 250 seasons came and went in his making using that one plane year in year out and no one noticed but him. One would likely say that he was a manual workman and of a simple way yet made contented by his simply using a simple tool. I think that was true. And more than once, in my long life, I have enjoyed being a man just like him.

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