Living Wages

Poetry. Stitching a seam. Sweeping a floor. First light after working the all- night shift. These are small moments in everyday jobs, but surprisingly luminous. In his tenth book, Michael Chitwood describes hard, often dangerous labor, but renders also the quietude of housekeeping and office routines. We call this "making a living," the way we move through our days, to pay for the roof over our heads. Raking autumn leaves or drilling a dynamite hole to clear rock for a house foundation, we construct our lives. Chitwood knows that what we do today roots us in the past and becomes our future. Here is praise, as Gerard Manley Hopkins said, for all our gear and tackle.