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A long day of sawmilling and a li'l ol' hole punched in the side panel of my new truck reminded me of a profound blessing in my life: I have a good son.
Fact is, Honey and I are blessed to have two good sons and a good daughter, not to mention their wonderful spouses and five grandsons to be proud of.
But this is about Seed, our eldest child. He is 45.
The hole was (and is) in my pretty white 2019 Ford F-150, the result of a little mishap near the end of a big work party Saturday. I had a portable sawmill come in to cut up oak logs I had lined up in our yard.
I had just hauled a trailer load of bark slabs and stepped down from our 1953 Farmall tractor when Seed approached. He had a small smile on his face as he put a sweaty arm around my shoulders.
"I have bad news, father," he said, his voice gentle and kind, the sort of voice you would expect when being told your dog was just run over.
"I put a hole in your new truck."
"What? A hole? What do you mean, 'a hole?'"
He showed me the hole, as big as my hand, a jigsaw puzzle of shredded aluminum in a rear quarter panel of the truck, just behind the tire.
"I'll fix it," Seed promised.
I couldn't be angry at him. I have done worse.
This accident itself could have been much worse.
The logs I was having cut up were from 100-foot-tall red oak and white oak trees, plus a few black cherry, from behind our house. A year ago I hired a tree service to fell them safely out of fear that they could fall in a windstorm and crush our house. I cut up the limbs for firewood, sectioned the trunks into lengths that could be dragged (downhill, barely) with our 50-horsepower Kubota tractor, and lined them up in the yard, on a slight grade so they could be rolled down to the trailer-mounted sawmill. There they sat until the stars aligned to bring together a sawmiller and a crew of friends and family, men and boys, on a perfect day.
Our family sawmiller is Josh Butler from Clinton, Pa. A good guy, reasonably priced, whom we've used several times over the years. He told my wife he was hoping she would make grape salad for lunch like she did last time, and she by chance had.
Josh is a big man and not intimidated by large logs, but late in the day a big one from toward the top of the slope partially got away from him and almost hit my truck, according to Seed's telling of the tale. According an internet log calculator, the weight of this one would have approached a ton. I have some personal experience in stopping huge runaway logs like that, and my experience has been this: you don't. Something else will, eventually, and you just hope for nobody hurt and nothing important broken as gravity has its way.
When Josh got the log stopped, as Seed told the story, it was inches away from my truck. Seed then got on the Kubota to reposition the log and got too close to the truck. Oops and oh, well.
"I'm afraid we won't have enough help for the sawmiller," I told Seed a couple of weeks ago. He passed around the word to friends, including friends of his sons. My sister, Col. Peggy (who made cookies that day and got water and ice) helped me contact friends who hunt on our farm, and several came out, including one attorney and his son who drove from Wheeling. Most of my friends are too old to ask for this kind of hard labor, and truthfully I did more driving and watching than carrying on Saturday. We had a great crew; I owe all of them.
No one worked harder or smarter than Seed. I was nominally in charge, but Seed kept me straight and all the parts working like a well-oiled machine. We have similar personalities and senses of humor, and have always worked well together. I lean on him more as time goes on, and doubtless take him too much for granted.
A father hopes for his sons to be successful, to have happy lives and to make him proud, but you cannot control and only hope to influence what kind of men they become.
We were done with sawmilling by late afternoon. Our helpers departed with our thanks. A couple men and grandsons came into the house to make a supper from the remains of lunch. When everyone left, Honey and I rested our weary bones.
Late in the evening we heard a pounding noise from outside. It was Seed, working to make the hole in my truck less noticeable.
A good son. I could not ask for better.