Storytime: Making sense of all the hammers and the shoes

Since my husband’s unexpected death, I have slowly been making changes and sorting through my life.

I started with the kitchen cabinets and all those condiments that apparently have expiration dates. Out went the hot sauce, the bottle of A1, and some kind of burn-your-face-off barbecue sauce.

All of them expired.

It is time for me to take inventory of my life, my home and all that fills it up. I need to sort things out, find their worth, and their place in my new world.

Last year, spring cleaning shamed me into cleaning out my husband’s clothes closet.

I sorted wisely and found a talented person who made pillows and bears out of the plaid shirts and fleece jackets that Randy wore best. I was surprised that sorting through Randy’s clothes was not as emotional as I worried it would be. After all, it’s just shoes and shirts and hanging suits.

I’m hanging on to the memories.

Now, another year of spring cleanup is here, and I am feeling the pressure. I decided it was probably time to open the door to my husband’s tool shed and see what exactly is there.

I rarely have a need to go into Randy’s workspace because I have my own little pink toolbox that Randy put together for me so I wouldn’t go in there and mess with his stuff.

It’s time I messed with his stuff.

When I turned on the tool room light and really looked, I wondered what it was all about. As I opened doors and drawers in the multiple rolling toolboxes, there appeared to be multiple items of the same thing, each one in its only individual space. The longer I looked, the longer I wondered.

What is going on?

Why did we need eight toolboxes, seven cans of paint, six pails of nails, five spools of wire, four weed sprayers, three coils of rope, two sledgehammers, and a pegboard that had never been hung?

That’s not all.

When I started digging around, I found more hammers, screwdrivers and pliers than I wanted to count. I’ve been learning a lot lately — way more than I want to. Still, someone needs to explain how this tool thing works. Why does one person need all those hammers?

I called my son Taylor, who was horrified that I was standing close to his father’s power tools. I asked him why, why are there so many of the same thing?

Why are there so many hammers?

Taylor proceeded to tell me how it is with tools. Sometimes the job calls for one kind of tool, and the next job requires something else.

A hammer has to fit your hand and the job you are going to do. If it doesn’t, you buy another one that will. You will have your favorite hammer that feels good for a while, but then doesn’t feel like it used to. So you get a new one, but the old one might still come in handy.

Hmmm.

That’s when I shut the door and walked away, leaving all those random tools and countless hammers where they are. I cannot visualize needing more than my little pink toolbox, but when my son explained to me the philosophy of tools, I understood completely.

Taylor’s words of enlightenment are the very words I used to explain to my husband why I acquired so many pairs of shoes. Randy would frequently quiz me about my need for navy shoes, brown shoes, and five different styles of black shoes. He would sigh when he looked at my neatly paired pairs that either buckled, slipped on, or tied. When I showed up with a shoebox, he would simply shake his head.

“Why,” Randy would ask, “why do you need all those shoes?”

Apparently, the same reason I’m going to need all those hammers.

You can reach Lorry at lorrysstorys@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: Storytime: Making sense of all the hammers and the shoes