It was a warm spring morning. Last century. Just saying that makes me feel old. Seems like this story happened yesterday but in reality it was a long time ago.

The best memories stay with you. I can remember every detail of a bicycle wreck just before the bridge over the Towilaga. A no-hands-down-hill-run that got away from me. I can still feel the quiet of waking up in a sleeping bag covered in snow when I was camping with the Boy Scouts. I know exactly where I was when I kissed Beth for the first time.

Some memories are just that clear.

We lived in a tiny two-bedroom apartment in 1997. It was still dark when I headed over to Wayne’s house for breakfast that morning.

“Come over for some eggs and biscuits,” he said. “I’ve got something for you.”

Wayne and I met in 1982 in Atlanta. He was from Arab, Alabama. I was from Hampton, Georgia. Small town boys in the big city. We had no idea that when life shifted and sent us in opposite directions hundreds of miles apart that we would both end up in Pine Mountain, Georgia more than a decade later.

He and Debbie welcomed us into their home when I came to town to interview for the job at Callaway Gardens. Like good friends always do, we picked up where we had left off years before.

One of the pursuits in which we found some common ground was our search for a piece of ground suitable for building a house. He lived in a parsonage and wanted a place of his own. We were cramped in that tiny apartment with three kids and needed some room to spread out.

The year before we both had bought a few acres out in the county along Palmetto Creek. He owned the hill on the west side, and I had the sandy bottom with a house site on the rise above the creek on the east side.

Every time we got together we talked about our plans to build. We made drawings on napkins. We swapped makeshift floorplans that looked interesting. He had ideas about custom windows for some of the stained glass he made. I had ideas about big porches. He wanted two stories. I wanted everything on one level.

Wayne was the driven one between the two of us. He had more construction experience than I did. He got me involved with Habitat where I learned most of the basics about framing and the other systems of putting a house together.

“We can build our houses ourselves and help each other out,” he said. And for some crazy reason, I agreed.

When I walked into his kitchen that morning, the house was quiet except for the sound of sausage sizzling on the stove. Wayne loved to cook and feed folks. He would cook for fifty as soon as he’d cook for two.

We talked in whispers so as not to disturb the rest of his family while they slept on a Saturday morning. The biscuits were warm. The coffee, black.

I took a folded-up piece of paper out of my shirt pocket and flattened it out on the kitchen table.

“This is the house I’m going to build.” I had a page from a magazine; one of those that has a hundred different floorplans in it. “I want to move a few walls around, but we like the basic layout and look.”

You have to understand that I would never have dreamed of building my own house if it had not been for Wayne. He was fearless. Neither one of us had ever tackled this kind of a daunting project before, but that didn’t faze him.

“It’ll take us longer but think of the money we’ll save. Besides, we’ll have fun doing it and we’ll learn a few things along the way.”

I’m sopping up the last of the sausage gravy with my biscuit. Wayne leaves the table and comes back with two brand new East Wing 24oz framing hammers and lays them on the table.

“What’s this?” I mean, I knew they were hammers but knowing Wayne there was some purpose behind this gesture. I had never owned a serious hammer before. I had a beat up 16oz hammer from Kmart.

“These are covenant hammers,” he said. Wayne had a knack for attaching a meaning to things deeper than the obvious.

“Today,” he said, “we’re gonna make a covenant between you and me to build our houses together, and these hammers are the seal on that agreement.”

I felt like I was sitting with Moses and had just been put in charge of leading the stubborn masses out of Egypt. “Can’t you find someone else, Lord,” I thought. But for the next two years we worked side by side wandering in the wilderness of mortar and block and wood and sheetrock.

Some days we worked on the east side of the creek. Some days we worked up on the hill on the west side. The two covenant hammers were always hanging from the hooks on our tool belts.

You already know that Wayne passed away a short time ago due to complications from cancer. He was with me nearly every day when I lost Beth. I tried my best to be with him in his final days. I even took tacos to him in the hospital.

This past weekend Debbie texted me and said she had something for me. In my mind I knew it was probably a gesture of thanks for building Wayne’s coffin. She had been busy with her girls, spending time with family. We hadn’t talked much since the funeral.

She came over with her daughter Joanna. I was out in my shop piddling. When she walked in, she had Wayne’s hammer in her hand.

“I wanted you to have something of Wayne’s,” she said. “There’s still a little bit of orange paint on it. You know he always marked his tools with orange paint.”

I did know that. Orange and white paint, to be precise. With all the Habitat projects we did together, we learned that if you didn’t mark your tools they would end up in somebody else’s toolbox at the end of the day. I marked mine with blue and red paint.

“I know that hammer,” I said. I walked over to the bench and got mine to show her that they matched except for the paint markings. I told her the story that I just told you, which I thought she would know and was surprised that she had not heard that little bit of our history.

“I didn’t know that,” she said. “That makes it even more fitting that you should have it.”

I got a little sawdust in my eyes at that point.

Is it silly to think that a chunk of metal could mean anything? I know that for the last 25 years, every time I have used mine I have thought of that breakfast so long ago and the pact we made with those two hammers.

It’s funny. Some memories you hold on to. Some hold on to you.