Spring Cleaning the Workshop Garden
A quiet afternoon of spring cleaning at our leather workshop on Waterfall Farm.
This video follows the process of clearing and restoring the garden and entrance to the shop — pruning an overgrown Japanese maple, raking back layers of leaves, repairing the screen door, repainting the entry door, and resetting the stone courtyard.
The quiet, ongoing work of keeping things in good order. No talking, just the sounds of tools, water, and steady work.
It has been several years since the entrance to the leather shop has gotten much attention. The Japanese maple is rangy and has overgrown the pathway. The rock wall is buried under so many layers of leaves that the leaf matter has begun turning to soil in places. The hand-collected stone that covers the tiny courtyard has been pressed into the earth, overgrown by small plants or kicked to the side. The screen door is in tatters. The light fixture is dirty and askew. These changes happen gradually — the eye doesn’t always notice from one day to the next.
Living on Waterfall Farm has been a master course in maintenance. When we first moved here in 2015, we were starry-eyed with dreams, imagining the life we wanted to live. The ensuing decade was a marathon of acquisition and infrastructure-building — starting a family, growing our business, buying tools and machines, building and rehabbing spaces to outfit our goals as makers, farmers, people trying to live a good life in a rural place. Every new thing we built or gained gave us a deep thrill and sense of accomplishment.
As our dreams began to take shape, we started to notice that having the things was only a small piece of a much bigger puzzle. Once we had the workshop, the machines, the specialized tools, it became our job not only to do the work we’d planned to do with them, but to tend to them — maintenance, upkeep, storage, organization, cleanliness. It never crossed our minds in those early dreaming years that we would spend so much of our time and energy simply taking care of what we have.
And so here we are — slow, quiet hours sunk into the care of one little spot, making it shine a little more, tending the spaces that hold our dreams. It’s easy to fall in love with the dream of a place. But what of maintenance? Can we fall in love with that too?