Old wooden toolbox
There’s an old wooden box in the basement room, I euphemistically call the “tool room”. Actually, it’s the old coal storage bin. When you live in a century old home in Southern Illinois, you have an old coal storage bin in the basement. It became just another storage closet decades ago when a previous owner converted the monstrous old furnace from coal fired to natural gas. When we bought the house, it became “the tool room”.
The wooden box is about the size of a shoebox. It’s obviously handmade, with a hook and eye clasp to hold the top closed and a cabinet pull anchored to the top with four slot-head wood screws. The one-inch-thick pine boards square sawn and stained a dark walnut.
It’s a simple box. There’s no ornamentation, no varnish, no dowels holding it together. The corners aren’t mitered, just nailed together. It won’t ever gain a showing on PBS’s Antique Roadshow as a fine example of American workmanship, at least not in my lifetime.
It’s just a sturdy wooden box filled with open-end wrenches, box-end wrenches, wooden-handled screwdrivers that you can’t find at the hardware store anymore, and other bits and pieces of tools you acquire when you tune your own car engine and change your own oil and keep jumper cables in the trunk because the battery’s a little weak.
That wooden box is well over fifty years old and many of the tools are likely older. There’s an old set of ignition points for a Ford near the bottom and the feeler gauges used to set them. Not much use for either anymore.
I don’t open that box much anymore. I have little need for the tools in it. I haven’t crawled under a car to change the oil or popped the hood to put in a new set of points in a long, long time. And likely won’t ever again. Some of those tools are still bright and shiny after fifty years of sitting in that wooden box. Others discolored from years of use long ago.
That toolbox sat in car trunks or behind the seat of pickup trucks because you knew you’d need those tools. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But sooner or later you’d need them.
That box sits on the bottom shelf next to the paint cans for the newly painted house trim, hidden behind the garden hoses brought in for the winter. It sits there waiting until the next time it’s needed.
My dad built that box. He measured the wood. He cut it and nailed it together. He put the hinges on the lid and the hook and eye tooth closure and the cabinet pull to open the lid. It’s a sturdy cabinet pull because you carry that box with that cabinet pull. Loaded with the tools and built of that one-inch lumber it’s heavy so you need a sturdy cabinet pull.
Why dad didn’t just go to the hardware store and buy a metal, shoebox size toolbox I’ll never know. But he didn’t. He built that toolbox and stained it and filled it with a selection of tools from his tools.
He handed it to me when I loaded my duffle bag into my used Ford hardtop to head for my first assignment after basic military training. “It isn’t much, but you may need this,” he said. I nodded and loaded into the trunk next to the duffle bag and the worn spare tire.
That old toolbox is filled with old tools and old memories and maybe just a little bit of love. Thanks Dad.
(c) William L. Enyart
Reflections from the River
www.billenyart.com
Email: bill@billenyart.com