Girls in the Wood Shop.

The girls wanted the option of taking wood shop instead of home economics.

I was in grade eight. . . or maybe it was grade seven? It was a long, long time ago. I went to a small, rural school with less than two hundred students from kindergarten to grade eight. Our grade seven teacher also then became our grade eight teacher which is why my memory is fuzzy. Two years smooshed into one.

I don’t remember which one of us girls started the rebellion but I think we all joined in. The boys had always been the ones to come out of wood shop, with cool – sometimes a little crooked – wooden creations while we were stuck frying eggs and eating them with maple syrup (not sure why – maple syrup is good on anything though) and we’d decided we wanted to take wood shop for a change. I don’t remember our teacher being overly excited about having girls in the wood shop but to be really honest, I don’t think HE really wanted to be in there. He never really struck me as a manual labour kind of guy. But, we won the battle and into the wood shop we went.

I do remember walking in there for the first time. It was bright, smelled awesome, and was filled with all the cool tools! Being the oldest of three girls with a Dad who always had some new and interesting mechanical creature in the yard, loud and freaky looking tools didn’t scare me one bit. This was going to be the best class EVER!

After what I’m sure was an extensive safety orientation that I have absolutely no memory of, we were to choose a project. I decided to make a bowl. Yes, because the sheer pee-in-my-pants excitement of a giant block of wood spinning at warp speed as I try to shape it into something recognizable by holding a sharp stick – longer than my thirteen year old arm – against it sounded like a blast! It was! I proudly brought my bowl home and it’s probably tucked away in some old box of keepsakes in my parent’s basement.

It’s taken me many years to get back to the feeling I had in that wood shop. The feeling of complete confidence in what I was doing, even though I’d never done it before. Thinking back on it now, it’s the ONLY memory I have of those awkward junior high years where I didn’t give a rat’s ass about what the other girls were doing, saying, or thought about what I was doing or how I looked doing it. I don’t know if they were giggling and pointing at me from the popular girls “corner of coolness” that inhabits all junior high classrooms, I don’t even remember them being there in that wood shop at all. All I remember is that chunk of wood spinning on that lathe and that I made something out of it.

A brain has a funny way of pushing memories out-of-the-way. I’ve spent a great deal of time out of my adult life wondering what I’m meant to do. Who am I meant to be? I haven’t thought about that class in almost thirty years and thinking about it now makes me smile for that little girl, wearing oversized safety glasses, turning that bowl. The little girl who didn’t realize it then, but who would eventually lose all track of time taking old salvaged wood and using it to create new and interesting things. That little girl who’s now a grown woman, standing there in her own wood shop surrounded by a cloud of sawdust, with a big smile on her face, doing what makes her heart happy.