Illustration by Burton Durand, detail.
Step through the side yard, mind the blue runner who lives along the path and the turtle who shares the space with the snake, turn the corner of the house, and walk through a gap in the wooden fence. This is where I go when the world is too much.
The structure behind the fence looks like one of those roadside chapels that were everywhere in the 1960s. There used to be one near Bowlero, a bowling alley near the north traffic circle in my hometown of Alexandria. You’d call the place behind my house a shed.
I marvel at the phenomenon of the Tiny House and the websites that become digital altars to these little dwellings. There is a site called “Tiny House Nation,” pulsating pixels of domesticity. Some friends and I, far ahead of our time at age 9, built a clubhouse behind our garage. The house was huge in our heads, but the lumber at hand was more conducive to a chicken coop than a classy condo. Anyway, we built this little space with wood scrounged from alleyways. Alexandria has a network of alleys kids used, and I hope still use, as alternatives to streets.
The finished club house was too small to hold a meeting in, let alone sleep in, but we could not admit it. A fall evening came, and we piled in. My mother could see one end of the clubhouse from her kitchen window. The sight that greeted her as she made coffee the next morning were three pairs of bare feet jutting from the clubhouse at ground level. We worked without measuring in those days; it hadn’t occurred to us to have the tallest among us stretch out on the ground to establish a sleeping length for the floor plan. As the night wore on and things got cramped in the little house, we kicked out the bottom wall board.
That first effort in building what, in effect, was a tent made of wood was all the preparation I had for building a shed in my backyard. Lucky for me, a son had happened in the intervening years who could do a bit of carpentry. Over two Father’s Days, he and I (mostly him) built the shed where I go on fall days and mild summer days to think and to plan work.
Before the wooden, tin-topped shed that today houses well-oiled and well-used hoes, rakes, shovels, saws, parts of wagons, lawnmowers, bicycles, wire, bags of potting soil, stacks of plastic plant pots, a collapsible greenhouse, and a rarely-used barbecue cooker, there was an inglorious shed of metal from the Giant Box Store. A proper shed must be made of wood. Don’t know why. Just is. But for years it was that sad metal thing hidden from the street by a wooden fence that was my place to hide out. When my wife needed me for something, she’d loose my pre-school son to find me. Like a little heat-seeking missile, guided by his genes, he’d find me, usually sitting in the doorway of the metal building. That’s what I called it: “the metal building.” It wasn’t worth calling a shed.
When I was a young father, I would escape to the garden shed ostensibly to sharpen hoe and shovel blades, change the oil in the lawnmower, rearrange for the umpteenth time the watering cans, pruning shears, garden hoses, tomato cages and the tool box that holds tools I’ve found in the street on bicycle rides. When my son was small and found me hiding, I would take him prisoner, seat him on an overturned three-gallon planting pot, tune the radio I kept out there to the pre-game interviews, and shush the message he’d been sent to deliver.
“Momma says it’s time to eat.”
“We’ll go inside in a minute,” I’d say. Then, we’d look around the walls of the shed at all the simple tools that didn’t require gasoline or electricity, didn’t make that awful sound that jars a weekend morning, can be used over and over and will live for years on the sparing applications of 3-IN-ONE oil. “Lubricates, cleans and prevents rust.” Says it right on the flat can with nipple top and rounded edges.
A shed’s shelves hold the evidence of how our thinking changes over the years. Shelves in the shed once held an arsenal of chemicals that I used so sparingly they clouded in their jars or solidified in their cardboard packages. There is still some Roundup out there, which I keep meaning to get rid of. There’s been another warning about the herbicide’s cancer-causing ingredients.
There is an on-again, off-again feral smell in the shed, a family of rats or raccoons is my guess. I’m happy the shed is home to someone when I’m not in there rummaging. As long as they don’t show themselves, I’ll pretend they’re not there.
A friend likes to say, “If you can’t find something, you don’t own it.” Sheds are an attempt to organize our things as a way of simplifying our lives. Sheds are to our outside selves what home offices, studies, and large closets are to our indoor selves. But sheds are more. They are structures apart from houses. They are where we go to think and remember. If you have the time and money, take a trip to Colorado to sort out your life. Go fishing. Go to the movies, the bookstore, the library. Or take the short walk to the shed to stand in the middle of familiar things to breathe the 3-IN-ONE oil, lubricant for a chafed spirit, balm for a chattering brain.
