It’s a cool fall morning. October is finally here, and the weather is cooperating with the season of the year. My little spot on earth in the woods along the 32nd line of latitude is tilting farther away from the sun. The daylight hours are getting shorter.

I have on a long sleeve T as I push on the roll-up door to my shop. The aroma of sawdust hits me like the smell of burgers on the grill. I live in sawdust out here. Oak. Cedar. Chestnut. Spruce. It’s like walking into one of those spice and candle shops at the mall, only better.

I am not a neat freak. My shop shows that. There are layers of sawdust covering most everything in sight. My car wash bucket in the corner is covered in dust. The rocking chairs near the door would leave an imprint on your backside if you sat in one of them. The floor around the saw table is three inches thick in chips and wood particles that I have raked off the table between projects.

When it gets bad enough, I will get out the broom and sweep. I’ll poke around table legs, under and around some of my machines, and I’ll gather up enough sawdust to fill a 30-gallon barrel. I’ll take my load out into the woods behind the shop and deliver it back to the earth beneath the living oaks and maples. It’s almost like an “ashes to ashes, and dust to dust” burial of sorts. Small bits of trees returning to the ground from whence they came.

I never try to get all of the sawdust. That would be near impossible to do. Besides, there’s only more sawdust to come that will take the place of what has been swept up. It’s a never-ending cycle for a guy who loves to work with wood.

But today the sawdust is thick. I am about to add more to my collection.

Marion has become my shop buddy. I’ve never known a woman who loves woodworking as much as I do. She wears a canvas shop apron. She knows how to set the table saw fence with a tape measure. She doesn’t shy away from the roar of the machines. And she’s a wizard with an orbital sander.

“It’s not smooth until I work it down with my 400-grit disc,” she says.

She speaks my language.

On this visit, she brought several 1.5” thick slabs of rough-cut cedar from a tree taken down near her house 7 years ago. She also brought a couple of old picture frames made from chestnut that came from an old barn that belonged to the grandfather of one of her friends. The frames are rough and thick and textured with nail holes.

Her friend saw a box we made a few weeks ago and asked her if she thought we could use the frames to make a box for his wife.

I like the challenge of making something from old wood. Clean and straight wood from the store is fine. I’ve made a lot of sawdust from new wood. But the old wood tells a story. I imagine the hands that made these frames, probably 40 years ago. I see the cows that nudged up against it in their stall. The hay that filled a manger. The pitchfork that hung by a nail.

As I understand it, the old barn is gone. These frames are all that’s left of a young girl’s memories of spending her childhood with her grandparents. Both frames held pictures of that era of her life. One is of the barn and one of the white wood-sided farmhouse with a 66 Chevy Cheyenne parked under the carport. Two tone blue and white.

Like a lot of our personal treasures, these frames no longer hung on the wall but were stored away somewhere out of sight. The idea was to make something new, something practical that she would use and touch and keep. A small box for her Bible on the side table by the couch came to his mind.

We took the frames apart and resawed the thick pieces in order to have enough to make the box. We planned the surface and straightened the edges and glued up several small panels. Every cut made more sawdust. For a while I was worried that we might end up with more sawdust than box, but we ended up with exactly what we needed.

Here’s the thing with a project like this. There’s no room for error. With most of the things I make in the shop, I make mistakes. I make a wrong cut. I measure wrong. I let the router grab a piece that makes a gouge in the edge that shouldn’t be there. If I make a mistake, I grab another piece and start over.

This time there is no extra wood. Anything extra here is either a sliver of something unusable or sawdust. If we make a mistake, the box will not be made. Not from this wood.

So, we are careful beyond belief. We talk about how we will put this box together. We play with multiple options. We set up the jig for box joints and run several small scraps before placing the real box in the jig. No cut is made without thinking it through. No glue is applied without first saying, “Are you sure?”

One wrong move and a man’s gift for his wife could lie in ruins.

The whole time we are working on this box we are also working on one of the cedar slabs to make a bench. Good Lord, I love the smell of cedar. I’m cutting the slab down to size. Marion is scrapping off the bark edges and digging out the loose material around the imperfections. Her sander whirring constantly. The box is sitting off to the side in clamps waiting on the glue to dry.

We are knee deep in dust and the aroma is overwhelming. The dust is stuck to our clothes and in our hair and plastered to our faces. If you don’t get it, then you don’t understand the beauty of it all.

“It’s like making something out of nothing,” she says.

I don’t know how the creative side of life really works, but it’s something like that. A gift of grace from the Creator Himself, maybe. A blank canvas. A formless pile of clay. A raw piece of wood. And from that a box is formed. A bench takes shape. Something rises out of nothing.

I think we’re all meant to create something in this life. Taking what we’re given and working with the pieces that take shape. Sometimes the work is tedious. Sometimes we have the luxury of starting over. Sometimes we work with very little margin for error. And while we work, usually we have no idea of how it will turn out.

Most times our lives are simple pieces rather than elaborate creations. The beauty of life is not in the complexity but rather in the simplicity of it.

And always, there is sawdust on the floor once we’re done.