The Long-Legged House by Wendell Berry

SOMETIME IN THE TWENTIES, nobody knows exactly when any more, Curran Mathews built a cabin of two small rooms near Port Royal between the Kentucky River and the road, on a narrow strip of land belonging to my mother's father. Curran Mathews was my grandmother's bachelor brother. He died of cancer when I was a child and I have come to know him better since his death than I did while he was alive. At the time he died I knew him mostly as a sort of wanderer visiting in the family households, an inspired tinkerer with broken gadgetry and furniture, a man of small disciplines and solutions without either a home or a profession, and a teller of wonderful bedtime stories.

At that time the family still owned the building in Port Royal in which James Mathews, my great-grandfather, an immigrant from Ireland, had made shoes and run an undertaking business. There was a little partitioned-off space at the back of this building that Curran used as a workshop. He was good with tools, and a thorough workman-though I don't believe he ever made any money in that way, or ever intended to. I loved that little shop, and the smells of it, and spent some happy hours there. It smelled of varnish, and was filled with tools and objects of mysterious use. It was tucked away there, as if secretly, out of the way of the main coming and going of the town, looking out across the back lots into a pasture. And everything about it partook of the excitement I felt in this man, home from his wanderings, with his precise ways and peculiarly concentrated silences. I sat in the open doorway there one afternoon, a rich plot of sunlight on the floor around me, Curran quietly at work in the room at my back; I looked up at the ridge beyond the town, the open, still sunlit country of the summer afternoon, and felt a happiness I will never forget.