Looking Backward, Looking Forward

I’m writing this on January 1st, 2026, in the spirit of the New Year’s exercise of looking back and ahead.

I’m going to break the fourth wall, in a way, by making this partly a reflection on our journey so far, as well as my wholly unsolicited take on the feverish year in which this happened. That last part will have almost nothing to do with handcrafting and look more like what I do in my other life as an author and teacher at a small Catholic liberal arts college.

Not that you care, but I’m not Catholic, and they don’t care, which is one of a handful of things I appreciate about this particular flavor of Catholics. A few more things they’re big on are what they call the four pillars: study, community, service, and prayer, the last of which is sometimes secularized as “reflection.”

There is, however, and this I think you should know for no particular reason, a fifth pillar for the Sisters of Peace: Ohio State University football. Their Dominican motherhouse is in Columbus, Ohio, where I guess they train new sisters for service and where I know for certain they return to retire. I’m sure they do other things, and I ought to know more because I’ve visited them, but I truly have no idea, other than that they founded my college in 1925 to provide higher education to young women, many of whom, for roughly the first half-century of its existence, were married to young men attending Yale, which is just down the street.

Here’s what I do know. One of my favorite sisters once told me that the able-bodied among them in Columbus religiously attend OSU games, wearing their favorite players’ jerseys and yelling louder than anyone else in the stadium. Forgive me, for I’m about to sin in a minor way, but these Sisters of Peace are effing badasses. Some will drink you under the table (if we’re talking wine). Ask me how I know. Sure, they have a peaceful demeanor about them, but that’s the numbing agent they use right before they blindside you with their wit, business acumen, and political fearlessness.

Honoring these people who adopted and trusted me with the Socratic vocation to properly “corrupt the youth” by promoting reflection and introspection, here are my New Year’s reflections, some ECW-related, some not so much.

In my very first blog post, I recounted that Faith and I moved into an old house (1886) one year ago on New Year’s Eve, 2024; that this house has an oversized garage space for a boat or RV that the previous owners, who built it, called “the barn” (it has functioning hayloft doors and a pulley lift system; aside from that, it’s nothing more than an oversized garage, but barn sounds cooler); and that after months of organizing and renovating the house, we started setting up our workshop.

Looking back, I underestimated three things, the first two of which (we’ll call these the negatives) were cost and learning curve. I drew $5k from savings as seed money, thinking that would more than cover the cost of tool upgrades and stocking up on good-quality lumber. Faith, who loves spreadsheets, tracked expenses as much as possible. I don’t usually carry credit card debt, but $5k wasn't nearly enough. Random commissions from friends and family totalled around $2k in late 2025, without any advertising or marketing, even without this website going fully live. It was just our people coming over, seeing what we were doing, and asking us to make stuff. Even so, the card balance rose. We have a plan in place to bring it back down within a few months. All is good, but ECW’s start was, perhaps predictably, a heavier lift than what we naively anticipated.

That was also true of the skill set. To be clear, we went into this as moderately experienced crafters. I made and sold furniture in the 1990s, and then worked for two professional contractors as a finish carpenter to put myself through graduate school. Faith had experience in sewing, ceramics, resin epoxy, linograph, and woodworking when we met. I had done major renovations to my first home, from tiling to tearing down walls, building decks and stairs, installing countertops and kitchen cabinets, replacing windows and doors, casings, baseboards, crown moulding, and a bunch more. Before that, when my kids were born, I built a raised panel toybox and a rocking cradle. Still, when it came to seemingly more straightforward things like end-grain cutting boards, playing card boxes, stools, phone stands, and trays, each step of the way presented unexpected challenges. Precision and efficiency were the two big things. We had to learn how to calibrate our blades and machines. We had to build jigs to simplify repetitive cuts and make them safer and more accurate. We prototyped and perfected the hell out of things across multiple iterations. Our scrap bins were so full that we almost never needed to buy wood for the patio firepit.

The final thing, as I look back, that is definitely positive is that we experienced the gift of designing and making, not just as a hobby or occasional practicality like before, but as a daily lifestyle. It is still more hobby than jobby for us, which I like and hope it somewhat stays that way, but it’s daily, and that is a straight-up gift. Having a workshop, a head full of ideas, and time to realize them is a quality-of-life game-changer. I wake up in the morning with a thought or an image, walk the dogs, have some breakfast, head to the barn, and start making. It’s a well-lived life.

Looking forward, there are fun (and what I expect to be less fun, but might be wrong about it) things to accomplish. On the expected-to-be less-fun front, we’re thinking about seasonal stuff. I’ll be making Adirondack chairs, planter boxes, and picnic cutting boards for the spring. Come summer, we’ll start batching out stuff for December craft fairs, from coasters and cutting boards to whatever else we think might sell. We’ve never done a December arts and crafts fair, but we’ll dip our toes in and do at least one in 2026. People swear they’re money makers. I’m already sketching out how to stage our wares in a 10’ x 10’ booth.

Meanwhile, the funner part of 2026 for me will be the time spent designing and bringing new products to life. I’ve been making stools as practice for my goal of designing and making chairs. I’m excited for that. I’ll also make nightstands, coffee tables, and live-edge end tables. I finally perfected (by my standards) the design of a cell phone stand-slash-air plant holder for my friend Scott. I’ll do more of those. We’re designing more playing card boxes with custom inlays on the lids to match the designer card sets sold by a magic store we love in Brooklyn. They’ve invited us to send them samples that could sell in their store and online. Faith is hell-bent on learning how to do Kumiko designs, which are intricate, interlocking wood pieces that result in amazing patterns. I’ve started to do leathercrafting, and I’m thinking a lot about how to integrate it with woodworking. Everything we need to turn these ideas into reality is in the barn. The shop heater our buddy Marquis hardwired for us is on. We just need to get out there and do it.

So, looking back at the past year, I see progress and fortitude in the face of challenges. Looking forward, I see exciting ideas coming to life.

“Looking Backward” and “Looking Forward” are chapter titles from one of the best books I’ve read, Black Reconstruction in America, by W.E.B. DuBois. How I know it’s good is that my students say they loved reading it, that it’s “so spot on,” how “spookily up to date” it is, and they say it on the regular. There is no more honest feedback than what you get from otherwise permanently online 18-year-olds who can’t stand reading. Published in 1935, the cofounder of the NAACP looked back at the post-emancipation period of Reconstruction and ahead to the future of race relations in America. If you, too, can’t stand reading (no shame in that), I’m first of all a little surprised you’re still reading this, but I would also highly recommend you at least watch the PBS series Reconstruction: America After the Civil War. Skip Gates will fill you in on what you’re missing.

The short-lived Reconstruction era was a golden age for America. Former slaves acquired land, became farmers, lawyers, scientists, scholars, and business leaders; they entered the trades, got elected into Congress, and held state and local government positions. HBCUs were founded to educate new generations. But the whole thing was derailed a few years in, leaving us with lynchings, Jim Crow segregation, and the generational economic disparities it left in its wake, still today. I’m glad to own this house, but I’m grossed out that in 2026, black households still have one-tenth of the wealth, on average, of white households, not because of incompetence or moral failing (as is too often suggested by dumbies), but because rich white people manipulated working-class white people into agreeing to laws and policies that perpetuated the oppression of both groups.

If you read DuBois (or watch Skip), what you’ll pretty quickly gain some insight into is that the white working class was not so much to blame for this as it was manipulated by rich white folks who pitted their interests against freed slaves to ensure an ongoing source of cheap labor. This is when the KKK was born, targeting successful black people, burning their offices, houses, and workshops, and terrorizing them out of governmental positions. White supremacy is and always has been, IMO, a money-making strategy that enlists poor and working-class white people to perpetuate a culture war whose true goal is to make non-working-class people richer.

2025 was a litany of reiterations of Reconstruction’s demise. For the sake of an immigration and transgender crackdown, poor and working-class white people lost their health care subsidies so that rich white people could get grossly big tax breaks. Like poor and working-class white people, many black and brown people are the doers and makers in America, the ones perfecting their crafts so that others can have nicely painted and well-roofed houses. Looking back at what has transpired in 2025, it aches me to think about how many were complicit in the targeting of some, the least advantaged and most vulnerable, when the point was to continue to deprive them as well.

Looking forward, it’s 2026, an election year. There’s work to be done. We just need to get out there and do it.