I was a senior in high school when I realized I was a peasant.

We were required to write a detailed family narrative for our Advanced Placement history class, and I was appalled: my grandfather, a Birmingham factory worker, had spoken in a lower-class accent and contemplated running away to Australia to make his life better because his grandfather was a highwayman who drank too much and fired his blunderbuss up the chimneys of respectable drawing rooms and laughed when the soot covered the clean houses.

And that was only one side of the family.

I’m not sure why this realization bothered me so much, except that perhaps it collided with my growing teenage arrogance in my intellectual capabilities and general superiority to the rest of the world.

“We’re just a bunch of proles,” I whined to my father. “No class at all.”

“Blue-collar workers make the world go around, Nora,” he would remind me, knowing full well that my plumber brother and secretary and chef sisters were in earshot.

“And I shall not be one of them,” I would respond.

And so it went. I worked after school in an office, rode horses on the weekend, and studied in earnest to make straight As and so rewrite my family narrative of simplicity.

My ordinarily patient father did not tolerate this for long. One evening, during our usual family session of answering his question, “What did you do today to show kindness toward another person?” my father informed me that I was no longer going to work in the office after school but was to join him in the metal fabrication shop where he served as foreman.

I was not impressed.

Dad was steady and quiet. “I sometimes feel like you despise me because I’m uneducated.”

That stung. My dad and I were close, and always had been. Our love and respect were mutual, but I couldn’t deny that these had been fraying a little.

I knew Dad’s background – he finished formal education at fourteen and went away to an agricultural boarding school shortly afterward. His next two years were filled with early rising, outdoor work on the school’s farm, attending lectures, and studying late into the night.

“God gave us brains and hands to work with. He does not place one above the other. But it’s a gift when you can use both.”

He learned metalworking alongside agriculture and took to it at once. Later, it became a livelihood when he worked for a business that manufactured farm gates. “When you work with metal, you aren’t at the mercy of the weather as you are with farming,” he said.

Dad taught welding to any of his children who wanted to learn. My brother was the first, and two of my sisters followed. “Women make the best welders,” Dad said. “Everything is neat and tidy the first time. No do-overs.”

I was not one of those women. I never had been. That sort of thing was quite beneath me.

Until now: on my first day in the fabrication shop, I was sheepish. I put my head down and buttoned up the protective jacket and put on the gloves and earplugs. Dad grinned and handed me a wire brush and showed me a cart of welded pieces. My job, he explained, was to prep these parts for painting, brushing the welds and inspecting them. I scrubbed away at the welding spatter until it was smooth. Every weld had to be flawless, and the entire piece wiped clean with a cloth.

It wasn’t difficult work, but it was monotonous and messy. The workshop was foreign: a cacophony of industrial noise, the unfamiliar smell of cutting fluid from the milling machines, and the burned metallic odors rising into the exhaust hoods above the welders. I was used to office banter, the clack of keyboards, the smell of coffee and toner, clean work surfaces, a light and airy mood, the feeling of getting important work done. Now I was in an earplugged cocoon, working with metal. My busy mind had to focus on new kinds of details: making rough places smooth. Over and over.

That first week turned into a month. A new set of the same metal parts greeted me every day, along with a cheeky grin from my dad. From the quality of the welds and amount of spatter, I soon learned who welded well and who was beginning. I began to befriend the other workers – Larry, a Vietnam veteran; Ruben, who had served time in prison; Chuck, the gentle giant whose daughter was about my age; and Shane, who had fallen on hard times and needed a steady job with an understanding boss.

By Christmas, I was enjoying the work. I used what I dubbed the “noise of silence” to think. I had always loved hard work, but only on my terms. Working with metal put me in an environment of dust and grease and machines that millions of people enter each day in order to feed their families. Working with metal put me alongside people who didn’t judge others by the kind of work they did but were thankful just to have work to do.

I worked in that fabrication shop until my high school graduation. And I returned as often as I could before I started college that fall. It was addictive. Every time I walked in, there was work to do. Every time I left, the pile of unfinished pieces was ready for the next part of their journey.

By rescuing me from my teenage smugness and conceit and placing me amid metal and grime, my father was not romanticizing manual labor nor suggesting I should bury my intellectual abilities. “God gave us brains and hands to work with,” he told me. “He does not place one above the other. But it’s a gift when you can use both.”

Those days are a memory now. My dad died in 2007, just a few years after my husband and I moved with our two small sons to Australia, where the Danthonia Bruderhof community was just getting started. (Dad and Mom visited us for three precious months, in 2003, long enough for him to inspire the young men to help him make a steel-framed horse wagon, to fire up an old forge, and to fashion decorative hinges for a set of hardwood gates he built and installed at the site of the community’s future cemetery. My very young sons “helped” their grandfather.) But the years have not changed my love for working with metal, and I still do so every chance I get.

Danthonia Designs, the sign-making enterprise that provides our community’s primary income here in Australia, involves a lot of metal fabrication. I may not know how to weld or operate a CNC router or press brake, but there are always plenty of welds to prep for painting – and no part moves up the supply chain until that’s done. I’ve traded the inefficient wire brush of my youth for a pneumatic sander, with discs of varying grits to deliver the appropriate abrasion for the task. In the serenity of the noise of silence, I have time to be alone with my thoughts while I smooth out the world and fix the dents and straighten edges, readying an entire sign for its color coat.

Some days I get to work alongside my sons when they’re on break from university. They share my love of metal work – and have been blessed with learning opportunities to become skilled at it. One welds, another paints, but I always sand. It’s the center of the process, and the least glamorous.

My dad was a master craftsman not only of metal but also of the heart. He could hear the words that went unuttered, understand that imperfection is a given (starting with himself), smooth out a rough argument, visualize a finished product when everyone else saw scattered pieces, and nudge a wounded soul toward healing.

Naturally, I am still an unfinished piece, with plenty of rough corners and spattered welds still needing attention; we are each, after all, a work in progress. But I believe the gift my father gave me in that old workshop, now three decades ago, has done more to assist my “finishing process” than anything else in my life.

In my childhood home, my siblings and I often heard our parents quote Rabindranath Tagore’s famous lines: “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.” That first evening walking home from the workshop with my dad, service-as-joy was the farthest thing from my mind.

“Nora,” he said gently, “Often in life, we need to start over, from the bottom.” I looked up at him. “You want to live a life of service, right?” I nodded. “Well, service starts by doing the little things properly – sweeping the floor, taking out the trash, cleaning the toilet, or even brushing bits of metal. Until you can do those little things properly, you won’t do anything larger well either.”

And that is why I love to work – with mind or metal. Or both.