Samuel Whitfield

Samuel James Whitfield was a carpenter who mended everything in town except his own habit of giving the work away.

He met Eleanor at a church picnic in 1969, when he fixed the table her cobbler was sitting on, and married her under the Riverbend oak in the rain two years later. Forty years of birdhouses, porch swings, and one legendary treehouse followed.

He fell asleep on the porch most summer evenings mid-sentence, and everyone let him.