I admire anyone that can repair and build things. My dad was not a handy person. He called himself a wood butcher and that aptly describes how unhandy he was. My mother considered herself handy with her hammer, screwdrivers and pliers she kept in a kitchen drawer, but her type of repairing was actually cosmetic. She used shoe polish to make a picture frame the color she wanted, hid holes in the wall with wallpaper or put furniture in front of a crack she wanted to hide. The house I grew up in had drafty doors and windows. Most of the time we didn't notice, because my parents heated the house with a large wood-burning furnace in the basement. They kept the furnace stoked so well that when they were older and moved around less, their thermostat would usually be well over 80 degrees.

My brother, Steve and sister, Kate, are pretty good at mending things. The rest of us are so used to not seeing things work properly, that I think we are surprised when things do work right. For instance, I never knew that a manure spreader actually spread manure on a field. The manure spreader on the farm we grew up on had broken chains that were never fixed and my brothers tossed the manure out with pitchforks while another drove the tractor slowly on the field. I was amazed the first time I saw a manure spreader actually flicking out the manure as it moved along.

I knew that when I married, I wanted to marry someone that was handy and could fix things. When I met my husband, Tom, one of the first things he did was build me a wooden shelf. I was very impressed with the shelf and how he knew how to use tools. After we were married he made me a table, a few more shelves, and enrolled in a book club where he got a new do-it -yourself book each month. (We have a great collection of these books). He made a few wedding gifts such as breadboards and key hangers. He even took up woodcarving and carved a design on a small bookcase. Then when we moved to the farm we live on, all his wood making skills and interests were sucked out of him.

We live in an old run-down farmhouse. Something is always breaking in a house like this and with eight people living in it, that triples the chances of things not working. Granted the work load on a farm is great, and you could spend all your time fixing things and that doesn't pay the bills. But I found with each child I had, my husband became more like my father.

Whenever I told Tom something needed fixing he would say, "Yeah you are right, that is broke."

I had broken pieces of furniture waiting in corners to be fixed. Faucets that leaked, lamps with switches that no longer turned on and broken electrical appliances piling up in the cupboards. I finally realized that they were never going to be fixed. To be fair, Tom does mend a few things.

He replaced the cord on my blender that melted on the stove and got help putting a new storm door on our porch after the other one broke. He can be clever at fixing things. He is a gravedigger and one of the steps to get into the house broke. He has a pile of old head stones that were cracked and new ones were replaced at the cemeteries he digs at. He used three flat rectangle granite stones; one piled on top of the other, to make a new step to get into the house. No one else I know has steps like ours; I really married someone just like my father.

Sheila Donnelly can be reached at 434-2233 or by e-mail at newsroom@austindailyherald.com