Joe Bennett: A builder’s trip and a surprise visit from a winter’s wonderland

Joe Bennett says the sight of snow lifted his heart. Photo / George Heard

OPINION

The builder came around. I’d idly mentioned that I was thinking perhaps of having a little something built and he was keen that I should go ahead. But first, he would have to overcome my inertia. And to do that he’d have to allay the causes of that inertia.

First, a dread of the sheer fatigue of the process, of having to deal with councils and engineers and surveyors and all the other clippers of the ticket, and of having to pay the councils, engineers and clippers of the ticket for things that never crossed my mind when I first thought of the simple act of building a little something.

Second, a sense of pointlessness. For at my back I always hear time’s winged chariot hurrying near, and yonder all before us lie deserts of vast eternity. And viewed like that, sub specie aeternitatis, what is the point of going to the trouble of building a little something? I am warm and dry and fed. I have enough. More will not make me happier.

And then there’s money. Money can turn its hand to anything - food, drink, a new hip. But once it becomes a building, money loses its flexibility. It can no longer act as a buffer against misfortune, and can no longer bind the wounds that the world inflicts. And if there’s one sure thing at my age it’s that the years to come have wounds in them that will need binding.

So when the builder came up the drive in his builder’s van and took off his builder’s boots at the door, and sat down in the kitchen in front of the ranchslider that doesn’t, these were the barriers to building that he needed to shoulder aside.

I gave him coffee - milk, one sugar - and he went at it. He drew a sketch and a cross-section, and he wrote down notes and estimates of costs, and I noticed that he was left-handed, and he curled his writing arm around his words, as many lefties do, pulling the pen across the page within the loop of his forearm, to avoid smudging the ink. It looked like hard work.

Had I been left-handed would I have wanted to write for a living? Might I rather have become a builder? No, I would never have become a builder.

He spoke of piles and decks and cladding, but even as he did so I found myself as I sometimes was in maths class as a kid, mid-afternoon, when the teacher’s voice became a background hum, like bees or distant lawn mowing, and though my eyes were open I would have them focused on nothing, in sweet suspension of the here and now, a dreamy inattention, a waking sleep. And then over the builder’s shoulder, it began to snow.

Through the ranchslider behind him I could see decking, trees and a lot of sky and falling across it in heavy silence were fat slow snowflakes, dropping, dropping and thickening as I watched. And my heart lifted like a child’s heart. Already I could see the bird table beginning to gather a covering, half-melted to start with, but then gaining belief in itself, with snow landing on snow and rapidly whitening.

“Is your van four-wheel drive?” I said.

The builder looked up from his sketch and smiled at the sight of the snow. But the drive at my place is perilous and steep. Two inches of snow and I’m marooned up here until it melts. And he didn’t want to be marooned with me.

He left me his sketches and notes and put his boots back on and I watched him turn his van around, each tyre making black wet tracks through the snow and then he inched it down the drive in a manner I wouldn’t have dared.

He honked his horn when he made the bottom and I was left alone, watching the snow still falling, filling the world, and I put on boots and a hat and went walking in it as you do, heard it squeak underfoot, looked back at my footsteps, watched wads of it tumble suddenly from branches, put my hands out palm upwards to catch snowflakes and watch them melt, and revelled in a world transformed and muffled. It was beautiful.

Mid-afternoon the rains came and washed it all away. And I decided not to build.