The Saw and the Sawdust

He restored an old mountain cabin, wrote a sonnet to an old man and fell asleep, missing the sounds of the whippoorwill.

By Doug Cumming

Apr 22, 2023

In a Cabin

If I say “sawdust”
do you smell it, or remember
some warm day when you worked
in the whine and tremor of a power saw,
your dog, honey-colored, in the driveway?
If I wash these windows of the sawdust
that restoring this cabin left
on fifty years of grime and Time
on the panes, washed them clear
with crumpled newspaper and Windex,
can you hear the squeak?
And can you see what I see
this Sunday morning, out of these
clear windows, like the five senses
letting the supernatural world
into the cool and private world
of the soul? Any words I say
can only strike a memory in you —
something you have experienced deep
in your life as I have experienced
helping build this cabin, long ago
amid the smell of sawdust,
the feel of the saw, and of the sun.

All Those Miles

Wind and rain have stripped the maple bare
almost. But now against October blue
I watch a single leaf drift down the air
as level as an empty stilled canoe.
Seen through the tree a mountain range now broods.
I’ve never hiked the humpbacks of that spine,
but you, old man, have crossed the longitudes.
For you that ridge was but a starting line.
For you, the sum of hikes and marathons,
river runs, lake runs, the Teton range,
miles multiplied by your Age of Bronze,
would wind around the world four times. How strange
that if against a few steps now is weighed
that glory, all those miles were worth the trade.

The Whippoorwill

Oh how I miss the whippoorwill,
Its wistful willow-whipper snaps,

A wish that whisked the windowsill,
Childhood’s bugle blowing Taps.

Now the night seems way too still.
Oh how I miss the whippoorwill.

Doug Cumming

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Doug Cumming is an associate professor emeritus of journalism at Washington & Lee University with 26 years experience at metro newspapers and magazines. After getting at Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in mass communications, he has taught multimedia reporting and feature writing at Loyola University in New Orleans and at W&L in Virginia. Earlier, he worked at the newspapers in Raleigh, North Carolina, Providence, Rhode Island, and Atlanta, Georgia; was editor of the Sunday Magazine in Providence; and helped launch Southpoint monthly magazine in Atlanta. He won a George Polk Award and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. He also plays a mean saxophone. He now lives in Decatur, Georgia.