We never parked a car in the garage; it was a storage and work area. The big heavy wooden batwing doors at the end of the garage were seldom opened, but the area in front of them was kept clear. I loved the old garage. After I stepped over the threshold onto the earthen floor and pushed the narrow side door shut behind me, I became invisible to the rest of the world. I felt safe and secure in its cool shadowy interior. When I was in the garage, for a few priceless moments, there was just me and my imagination. I exulted in the scarce and precious solitude. I thought of the garage as a magical place, an Aladdin’s cave.  

As I stood with my back pressed against the door, peering into the shadowy half-light, the first noticeable thing was the peculiar smell characteristic of that one place in all the world. The scent was compounded of dry moist earth, motor oil, rubber tires, new wood, and sawdust. My eyes would catch the glint of gems from the shelves running around three sides of the garage walls. The shelves were laden with neatly labeled bright tin cans partially filled with different sized screws, nuts-and-bolts, shiny new nails and tools of all kinds. The tools that rested on these shelves, each in its particular place, were often handled precious friends of mine: pipe wrenches, wearing chipped red paint on their handles; the monkey wrench, silvery crescent wrenches, box and open-ended wrenches; wooden handled hammers: claw, ball pein, and sledge; planes: the jointer; the jack; the bench; the smoother; they ranged in size from huge down to my favorite, the small shaping plane with the bright blue knob; hand drills: the ratchet brace, the eggbeater, the Yankee: bits and augers that looked like hard silver ringlets; yellow carpenter’s folding rulers; framing squares; T-squares; screwdrivers: standard and Phillips; the red mouthed silver chalk box; pliers; needle nose; vice grips; channel locks; wire cutters; tin snips; files; chisels; wood rasps; crow bars; etcetera.

Sawhorses, fragrant sawdust, and long curls of wood shavings always littered the center of the floor. New lumber, arranged in neat piles according to size, lay across the open ceiling joists far above my head. Automotive tools, parts, and tires were along the opposite wall. Handsaws hung on nails above the workbench: rip saws, cross-cut saws; keyhole saws; coping saws. The workbench, at the far end of the garage to my right, beneath the only begrimed window, was usually littered with sawdust and tiny bits of debris from a work in progress. Today, the big workbench vise held a part of a project in its strong jaws. A diamond like glitter spilled out into the weak sunlight that shone on the workbench where silvery sharp points and heads of new six penny nails poked out of the torn corner of a worn, dusty, and wrinkled small brown sack from the hardware store. My daddy’s hands made magic come to life in this garage, and I got to help.

Ladders, the reel lawnmower, shovels, rakes, the hoe, and the ice cart were propped against the wall behind me. The ice cart was old now. The wood was rough and splintered and the gay red paint had mostly peeled away revealing grey wood beneath. My daddy had built the ice cart four years ago when Wendell was five and I was four, so that we I could go to the icehouse and buy blocks of ice for the icebox. We would proudly pull our bright red little ice cart three blocks to the icehouse and then home again. The icehouse was like a great cool, shadowy, fragrant cavern with a damp sawdust covered floor and endless blocks of ice piled up to the high, high ceiling. I was always amazed that every block of ice the men picked up with their big, rusty looking, four pronged ice tongs, fit into our ice cart exactly right; those ice tongs left a small dimple in each side of the ice,. When the ice was put into the cart, it was a milky translucent white that gave off steam; when we got home, the ice wore a thin glistening coat of transparent frozen water. We always laid the change from buying the block of ice on top of the ice; by the time we reached home the coins had melted into the surface of the ice.

My time in the haven of the garage was just about to end. I was standing and marveling at the fact that the feeble sunbeam coming through the single grimy window changed where it shone, but the glittery dust motes dancing in its light always seemed to be the same. I must have moved and bumped or dislodged something. The next thing I knew, there was a tremendously hard whack on the right side of my head, and then the heavy lead pipe handle of the ice cart thumped my right shoulder on its way down to the dirt floor beside my bare foot. OUCH! THAT HURT! THAT HURT A LOT! Stunned, I dropped to my hands and knees. When I reached up to touch the spot on my head where I had been whacked, my hand came away sticky with blood. My blood?