laying like a stick

From growing up in Massachusetts I had always assumed that the rest of New England was essentially just an extension of Boston suburbs. The culture and landscape varied slightly but since we all followed to same sports teams and was exposed to the same weather we were all generally the same state or at least shared the same state of mind. So when I left to go to woodworking school in upstate Vermont I had figured that I wasn’t straying too far out of my comfort zone.

On a superficial level everything seemed to be the same, you could detect an accent at times, but other than that it felt like any other woodshop that I had worked in before. I found myself fitting in just fine bullshitting and joking with the other woodworking seeing how well I could take a joke. In any kind of shop the new guy always takes a good ribbing to test how far he can be pushed. The key is not to take offense and try to give it back as good as I could take it. I had already had some previous experience in woodworking and my skills seemed to match up well with the other students and my drive and thirst for knowledge placed me among the top students at the school. There was something missing however, something elusive that somehow kept me apart.


After I had been in school for a while I felt like I was fitting in and living the lifestyle of a Vermonter. While I was feeding the wood furnace with Bob Fletcher ,the master woodworker, I asked him how long I had to live in the state before I too became a Vermonter he pointed to his old dog Sadie who was lying by the woodpile “Just because she is laying next to the wood pile, it doesn’t make her a stick!” This joke Bob had recycled but it was defiantly a truism. The difference between Vermont and other places was not on the surface, it was much deeper than that, it was a state of mind, an attitude that was something that I could not learn from a lecture or a book and it was something that you just cant fake. So this blog is my story about trying to lay like a stick and achieve a quality kind of life.