I sharpened an axe after a year of not bothering, and the kitchen knives are still blunt

The axe hadn't been sharpened in over a year. There simply wasn't a need, I guess it could be put down to laziness, and I'll own it. Nothing had gone wrong, and nothing had prompted it.

The week before, Dan had stayed and we'd split a good deal of wood. It came out of that a lot blunter than it should have been, and since I've had more wood to split.

So on the Saturday evening, in the gap before it got dark and before I had to put my daughter to bed, I took it into the woods with a sharpening stone and sat down on a log.

Two grades. Coarse first, the hard work, taking metal off and then fine, refining the progress the the first side had made. About a hundred passes, wet, moving the stone away from the edge as my dad taught me that twenty years ago.

I sat for as long as it took, didn't decide on a length of time and didn't check the time - I knew my daughter's bedtime was sundown. I ran my thumb across the edge to know when it was done.

Four things in it were satisfying, and only one of them was the axe: the edge coming up, the sound the stone made, the sitting, and being on one task with nothing else in it. The focus was like a form of meditation.

What was interesting was that the year prior, and the axe being blunt, had cost nothing. The axe was blunt for over twelve months and there was no consequence at all. Nothing broke, nothing was missed, nobody mentioned it. It only became a blunt axe in the week somebody came to stay and there was wood to split, and then it was sharp again within six days.

None of the three things it needed had been the obstacle. The technique was twenty years old and arrived intact inside the first few passes. The half hour I found in an evening without moving anything. And the stone came from a shop and cost under $10.

What I did not have, for a year, was a reason.

I would rather not write the next part. The kitchen knives are in the same state and I have still not touched them. Same hands, same stone, and I know how. They are blunt, they still cut badly enough to get by, and nobody has said anything in order of making them better.