Grandpa’s Pickaxe

While helping my father and uncle on the farm one summer, we ran into an obstacle. A trench needed to be dug under a shed so a water line could run water to our pigs. The backhoe was too tall to fit under the roof, so the digging had to be by hand. What I needed was a pickaxe to loosen and pry up the large cobble rocks that were so plentiful in the area. My dad suggested that I look for one in the back of his truck.

The tool I found turned out to be much more than a just another pickaxe. It was the pickaxe. In our efforts to teach our kids some of life’s most important lessons, my wife and I have told and retold the story where this exact tool symbolized the grit, determination, self-reliance, and work- ethic that we wanted them to gain. I had meant to search the sheds for this treasure, and now here it was, in my hands.

The story began a few years ago, when after months of coaxing, my mother and father finally convinced my grandfather to move in with them. He had been a widower for years and was mostly wheelchair bound due to his knees and hips being “gone.” Immediately after relocating, Grandpa’s drive to be productive pushed him to look for things he could do to contribute to the family.

Each day he would rise early, dress for the day, eat, then “go to work.” And he always found work to do. My parents had long talked of turning part of their ranch into a family park for big family gatherings and reunions. Relatives would be able to bring their tents and trailers and stay for a week. Grandpa caught the vision and decided to take matters into his own hands by clearing the area of sagebrush and trimming all the dead branches from the many cedar and pinion pine trees. Eventually water would be run, grass would be planted, and we’d have a real park.

Never asking if he could help or if there were tools available, he found the rusty head of an old pickaxe. The handle had been gone for years. Having learned resourcefulness, like most of the generation who lived through the Great Depression, he searched until he found a discarded wooden baseball bat which was whittled down with his pocket knife into a handle to fit the axe. Then grandpa went to work.

Every day he’d wheel his chair the 100 yards from the house and somehow, with a crutch, shovel and pick, clear the land. While his strength was probably 10% of what it once had been, “can’t” or “too much work” were not in his vocabulary. By the end of the summer there was a huge pile of brush and limbs to be burned, and the edge of the axe had been polished till it shone from use.

As a professional excavator, my dad owned all of the heavy equipment you could ever need. What took grandpa an entire summer to do could have been accomplished in minutes with a backhoe.

But this wasn’t about just getting the job done. It was about meaningful work, being productive, and loving your family enough to serve them each day.

Sitting in the back of Dad’s truck for years had taken a toll on the axe. But it did the job for us that day under the pig shed. I asked Dad if I could keep it, then took it home to glue the splintered wood of the old bat together again, sanded it slightly, then hung it over the piano in our living room as a continual reminder to our family of the value of hard work.

And when that work is done without complaint, in love, and in the name of family unity, it endures.

– Tim Thayne

Tim Thayne is a marriage and family therapist, entrepreneur, and nature lover. He and his wife Roxanne enjoy a life full of teens, young adults, and a few stolen moments with his horses. Read more on his blog “Notes From Home” at www.drtimthayne.com.