Hands of Strength and Skill

Ed had hands that could make most anything. When I was about 10 years old, he made box kite frames from strips of light weight wood, and he covered the frames in paper of different types, experimenting until he found the paper with right weight and strength. After several attempts to fly kites with paper so thin and light that the paper tore in the wind, and paper so thick and heavy that they couldn't quite get off the ground, he eventually settled on sticky-back shelf liner. It was thin and light, yet durable. We went across the road from our house to the pasture where the grass grew taller than his and mama's heads, and us kids thrilled to watch him run with the kite held high in one hand, tail flapping behind him, and see the kite lifted up into the wind. He held the string in his hands and let out more and more length of it as it rose higher and higher into the sky. After it was so high in the sky we could barely see it, he would let one of us kids hold the string, and we felt like we were 'doing something'. Most of the time, the string would eventually break, and the kite was set free to fly away to the heavens, never to be seen by us again. Sometimes we wrote notes on the sides of the kite...'Please write us if you find our kite...Shackleford Road...Duluth, GA, 30036".

Ed was a carpenter by trade. He framed houses, often working with his father-in-law (my mama's dad) and several brother-in-laws. For the last 25 - 30 years of his life, he worked for one man, Kenneth Mosely, at Mosely's Cabinet Shop. Most of those years,  Kenneth and Ed were the only employees, and a whole lot of the time, it was mostly just Ed. He built cabinets for expensive, beautiful homes. He also built them for mobile homes, for a local man who owned and rented them out. 

In every room of my house, there is a piece of furniture my step-dad built with his hands. When my first husband and I divorced, he took with him his grandmother's china cabinet, which I loved. Ed built one to replace it. When he brought it to my house, he showed me where he had carved my name into the wood, saying, 'Now, no one can take it away from you.' He built for me a t.v. stand with a 'hole' for the VCR.  He built Amber a book shelf with drawers in the bottom. He built both Amber and Jess 'hope chests'. I also have a quilt rack (on loan to Amber), a lingerie chest, several desks, a bakers rack, a corner curio type cabinet, and several decorative shelves. I have one piece that I got from Granny that is mostly just a square box with doors. I think she may have used it to put her t.v. on, I use it in my kitchen to store dishes I don't use often. I also have the tiny table and chairs and the miniature china cabinet he made for the girls when they were little.  The only piece I ever let go of was an oval coffee table, and that was given to my brother. I knew it would be kept in the family there. All these pieces are special because he made them, and when I walk in any room I have reminders of him and his skill and the time and love he put into each piece.

In Ed's last year and a half, he underwent treatments that robbed him of his physical strength. He went from looking and seeming like his 'old self', to a person who had to sit down and rest, to using a walker, to a wheelchair, and back to the walker, and finally only sitting or laying down. Because his brain tumor was on the left side of his brain, his right side became weak first, and eventually was paralyzed. But his left hand picked up where the right hand couldn't. He learned to do things with his left hand and he would reach out with that hand to take your hand. He could squeeze your hand with his, all the way up until the a day or two before he passed. You could still feel the strong man he had been in his grip. 

In his last year and a half on this earth, he could not build cabinets or furniture, he could not frame a house, or even build a kite. But he held our family together and kept us from falling apart, pulling us back from the edge of despair with his strong hands. And the day he died, he rose high into the sky like one of the box kites we flew in that pasture. But instead of eventually crashing to the ground, he continued on up into the heavens, and here we are, still holding the string.