Earning my Tool Belt

Last weekend, I worked hard. I worked really really hard. I spent the weekend participating in the local Habitat for Humanity Womens Build. This is an annual event (this is the 4th for the local group, my second) where a house is built from bottom to top by women. This year, the family it was being built for was a married couple, so there is one man on the crew.

There's something really powerful about women building a house. This is especially true in the first parts of the build, my area of specialty. In the beginning, you are putting up walls, trusses and sheathing the roof. These are exhausting, physically intensive jobs that require teamwork and just plain grit to get done.

Saturday, wall raising day, it rained. We were wet and miserable, cold and slogging through clay heavy mud. Words like "mire" "tar pit" and "I'm Stuck!" flew around the site freely. Words were the only thing moving freely through the job site. I held on, knowing that the next day I would be "in the air," the term used euphemistically to indicate the people who would be doing the roof.

Sunday was clear. It was the most perfect day for being in the air that could be imagined. It was heavily overcast, around 60 degrees, and not all that windy. We started by getting the headers set, the big, obnoxiously heavy end pieces at the front and back of the house that hang over the edge. Getting those in the air is always impressive. Doing it with a crew of only women is just that much more incredible and satisfying. I'm not sure how much they weigh, but it's somewhere around several hundred pounds. After that, my job was to grab the trusses and pull them up while they push from below. I'm proud that I was designated as strong enough for this job, but yesterday, I felt like I'd been run over by a truck. My abdomen was so sore, and I realized that it was from leaning over a wall, and pulling up one truss after another. After that, we had to center the truss. Somehow, it became my job to tap the end with a small sledgehammer to get it right. I should have pass it over to her after a while. The tendons on my right hand are still (Tuesday afternoon) objecting to motion, and the very idea of gripping something hard makes me wince.

We had the trusses set in place by noon and spent the afternoon sheathing the roof. I wasn't completely certain I could still hold a hammer, but hold one I did. I exchanged the framing hammer I'd been using to set the nails in the trusses for a lighter one for roof work. That helped. In the air, something to hold a hammer becomes critical. I didn't have the pants with the hammer loop, and I only had a nail pouch to hold the hammer, sort of. I was tired of worrying that I was going to drop my hammer on someone's head working below me. I decided I needed a tool belt. In a conversation with my partner, the woman I'd worked with last year, I talked about the decision to get a tool belt.

Getting a tool belt is an interesting decision for a woman. After all, exactly how often is a woman really going to need a tool belt?? There's something a little pretentious about a woman wearing a tool belt that's hers. Like combat boots, there's an expectation that this piece of equipment is meant to be used. If it's not, then owning it is a waste, it's an insult to the supreme utility intended by its existance. There are some things that are so rugged, so utilitarian, and so specifically made to *work* that owning it and not using it for that task is shameful.

I owned a herding dog once. I had two dogs, both were herding breeds. One, however, was a working dog. I never quite lived down my shame in owning such a finely composed tool and never using it for what it was intended. She was a working dog, and that's what she wanted to do. She tolerated being a pet, and made the best of it, but that's not what she was put on this planet to do, and we all knew it. When she died, I knew I'd failed to do what I'd always said I would. I had promised myself that I would make sure she had something to herd, that I would have moved out to the country before she passed and gave her something to move from place to place the way she intended. I didn't do that. Somehow, the time passed, the opportunity wasn't there, and she became old and feeble before I fulfilled my obligation to her utility.

Would I fulfill my obligation to the utility of a tool belt? Would it become worn and used as it should? Will I be able to find anything I'm looking for without concious thought because I've worn it enough that I know exactly where each pocket and each tool hangs on my body when it's there? Will the unfinished buckskin that tool belts are made of become slick and smooth in places where my hands have touched, where the tools have slid in and out? Or, will the belt remain clean and suede like, the leather still stiff and shaped by the factory and not by the tools it has held?

I speculated with my partner about whether a tool belt is something to be earned. There are other communities where things are earned. In the leather community, one earns their "leathers" by meeting certain standards set within the community they choose to participate in. I have a ring that I covet and want, a ring that signifies my being a part of the Latvian community, a symbol of that ethnicity, a ring that can only be given as a gift, and in my family is only given when a person learns the language. I haven't earned that ring yet, even tho I've spent years in half hearted efforts to learn.

In speaking of my concerns about getting a tool belt and whether I'd earned it, my partner turns to me, comprehending completely what I was saying and said with utter seriousness, "oh, you've *earned* your tool belt." I was so pleased by that, I wasn't sure what to say. If there's anyone who could make that judgement, in reality, it would be her. She is tough, super tough. I have never met another woman who works the way she does. She is supremely competant, and I respect that entirely. She works hard, she's straightforward, she's strong, and she's very much still a woman. Earning the respect of someone that you respect a great deal is a satisfying thing. I've had respect from people I don't respect and it's hollow.

I have earned the right to wear a tool belt. I work hard, and I do it often enough to justify having the right tool to do my job properly. I like working with Habitat, and I like building houses. I have a passion for housing, for building, I hadn't realized that until the last few years. In my mind, I had this vague notion of building my own home. At one time, that was The Plan. We were going to move to the country, build our own home, and get a flock of sheep for the dog to herd. I would spin wool, we would have a masonry stove to heat the place, backed up by passive solar. We were going to figure out how to generate our own electricity and grow our own food.

I'd been afraid I didn't have it in me. I thought building our own home was something that I couldn't do, that my body just wouldn't take it. I know that's not true now. My body is strong, it is able, and it can build. I spent 12 hours on Sunday alone working really really hard. I didn't do it alone, but I did a lot. I can build a house. While I'm not interested in building a stick built house, I know I can work hard, and I can get the job done. My tool belt won't go to waste, because I will make a home for myself and my children, in a very literal sense. Until then, I will make homes for other people, structures for other people to call home for their families, or in the case of Thunder Dome, homes for communities to come together and celebrate their unity. I build.