It was a pretty useless old shed, useless to me at least. My dad found plenty of ways to put it to use. The workbench that my grandfather built out of the side of the shed was another story entirely. I remember the workbench was high enough that a grown man didn’t have to bend over it as he worked, and high enough that my siblings and I used it as our “double secret hideout.” When my mother’s back was turned we would drape blankets from the couch over the sides to shade out the rest of the yard. In that shade little people would dance and attend school amongst the hornet’s nests and ant farms. To mom the entire shed and everything remotely related to it “a danger trap.” So when she outlawed our hideout we turned it into a parking garage for our Tonka trucks and avoided our desire to crawl beneath it and bath in the cool shade.
Her hatred for that shed wasn’t without incentive. My father’s obvious dependency on that shed wasn’t either. It is his dependency that drove her towards these repulsions. He built the shed when he knocked down the original garage on that property, promising that he would knock it down too as soon as he got around to building a new garage. This didn’t happen until eight years later. The garage he built took an entire summer to build and filled our back yard with tons of limestone. You couldn’t dig three feet deep in our yard without hitting a solid layer of limestone that seemed to penetrate further then the earth’s core. The limestone lined the long abandoned grooves dug by the glacier that passed through millions of years prior to the building of the new garage. The glacier dug the bed for the St. Croix River, the river that is just a trickle in the bottom of a huge furrow in the earth. This is where our home was built, and this rut is what we built the new garage into. I say into, not on, because the excavator we hired with a bank loan of $20,000 literally dug into the side of the valley. He hit rock, and when he dug out a boulder bigger than the two-door Toyota Celica my mother gave to our babysitter instead of her wages, he smiled with relief because mom told him to just roll it to the end of the driveway.
“We’re gonna keep this one,” she said.
After that two-story garage was built on a loan that wasn’t paid off until we sold the house, the shed still stood as tipsy as ever. My father’s main purpose for this shed, it would appear, was to shack up his booze. When my mother would venture in to find a monkey wrench or hammer to try to hold together our crumbling house she would get lost amongst the bottles, empty and full. It is probably these bottles that attracted the multitude of hornets nesting in the corners of the shed. I hardly ever ventured into the dark musty building because of the thought of hundreds of little yellow jackets buzzing around my face, their spindly black legs trailing behind their invisible wings as they land in my hair.
Mom likes to use a certain not so well known proverb to describe my parent’s decisions as the antithesis of what the proverb entails. Back then, when people referred to a particularly brutal procrastinator they would often say “He won’t spin on a dime,” or “when hell freezes over.” Meaning that he would put things off over and over, creating a vicious cycle for himself. In my parent’s case, they spun on that dime till it rendered them dizzy, hell froze over and over and icicles formed on the ceiling in the family room. Then, after much procrastination, they rushed through their decisions without considering much of an outcome. My father didn’t wait to give my mother another chance when he asked for a divorce and a few weeks later my mother was already knocking down the shed.
My mother’s sister Kitty was up from Iowa for the weekend when she did it. There was a dumpster in our yard just waiting for her to fill it and she knew just what to do with it. She gathered up all of the tools and bike parts my father hadn’t been able to part with over the years but had left behind when he moved out, and threw them in first. Then she grabbed a fiery orange extension cord from the garage and plugged in the Skil saw. She hacked at the workbench that had endangered her children’s lives. She sawed off the legs and threw them on top of the bike parts. The tabletop broke into pieces beneath her sweating palms and she almost believed she could tear it all down with her bare hands. Piles of sawdust and hornets nests littered the ground by her feet, and she laughed at the thought. She abandoned the saw for a sledgehammer when she was done with the workbench, stepping closer to her beliefs. She heaved metal over her shoulder before she crashed it down into the side of the shed. The thin insulation-lacking walls cracked beneath her swings and the roof came crashing down between them. Dust billowed up from the indistinguishable pile of lumber and my mother carried it away to the dumpster. The dime continued to spin.
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