Sledgehammer

Last summer, my brother taught me how to use a sledgehammer. We’d recently taken down a tree at the cottage, and needed to split the pieces of trunk to smaller logs for campfires. I expected them to be using an axe—but my brother told me those took more strength. Instead they used a metal wedge and a heavy sledgehammer.

The key to using a sledgehammer is to not try to command its weight—but guide it. At first, I picked up the giant tool and forced it down as I swung—holding onto it for control, for power. But sledgehammers aren’t built to be wielded by strength alone. They’re heavy because they fall hard—they land hard. Your job, as someone using it, is to control the fall. To lift up the weight, let your fingers slide down the handle as it begins its descent, and let gravity take care of the rest.

I never quite know how to tell people about my life. Most of the time, I go around avoiding the difficult parts of it. I don’t tell people about my dead parents—the plane crash at 13, the cancer diagnosis only 8 years later—I avoid it as best as I can.

Sometimes though—sometimes, it just comes out of me. Sometimes, I wield it like a weapon—or a tool. Sometimes, I know how the head will land when I bring the hammer up over my shoulder. Sometimes, I slam it down into the wedge. Sometimes, I can only control the descent—only let the weight of it drop, falling through the air, dragged down by gravity.

But it’s never not a sledgehammer—not really. Whether I am throwing the weight or guiding it—it always lands hard. Splits. And there is always the moment right before—the hammer in the air, its weight shifting, ready to drop—when I wonder what I’m doing. When I wonder how it will fall, how it will land, this time.