Bluegrass Courtship. Allie Pleiter

      Sawdust.

      Nothing on earth smelled like it, hung in the air like it, or stuck to things with the same airy weightlessness as sawdust. The scent struck a deep chord in Janet every time she caught a whiff of it. Sawdust meant Dad and things being built and Saturday mornings sitting on his workbench, still in her pajamas, sipping chocolate milk from a cup with a bendy straw. Watching Dad explain why you measured every piece of wood twice so you never cut it wrong. She practiced her alphabet by drawing letters in the sawdust with her fingers. She played with the curled yellow shavings from her father’s woodcutter, assembled leftover bits of wood the way other kids assembled blocks.

      It was the smell of sawdust that came to Janet first as she approached the church grounds. And the sounds; sawing, hammering, drilling, the particular tone of wood clunking together. Those noises and smells created one of Janet’s favorite feelings. All too often these days, she was buried under inventory and back orders and bookkeeping. And yet she still loved construction. The texture of wood beneath her hands, the smell of shavings, the satisfaction when two things fit together the way they ought to—these things were at the very core of her love for Bishop Hardware. They were what drew her to her own little version of construction—building birdhouses. Janet had turned one of her bedrooms into a workshop to spend her free hours building artful birdhouses. Castles, lighthouses, English cottages and all kinds of buildings became birdhouse styles for her to miniaturize. She was always cutting photographs of interesting houses from magazines, storing up ideas for future birdhouses. Her workroom had half a dozen carefully crafted pieces—some of them taking months to get just right—lined up on a shelf. To cut and feel and shape and join—even on a tiny scale—fed something so basic in her she couldn’t even begin to describe it. Dinah always said she “baked to live.” Janet’s nature was too practical for such an esoteric sense of vocation, and besides, you really baked to eat, didn’t you? But when she finished a birdhouse, or on a morning like this, when she walked onto a job site and saw the raw materials coming together to make something so much more than themselves, she could catch a glimpse of what Dinah meant.

      Middleburg Community Church, or “MCC” to its congregation, was what most people pictured when they thought of a small-town church. White siding, tall columns on either side of a china-blue front door, nestled up against a hillside with a parking lot that needed serious patching. The little fenced-in yard of the preschool was a muddy mess since the storm. The portion of the church that had housed the school had been a patchwork of make-do and as-we-get-the-funds repairs for weeks, leaving the church looking wounded and bandaged in a collection of tarps.

      Janet looked up as she crossed the church lawn to see that the preschool wing of the church was now completely gone. Simply cut right off the end, like a corner off a sheet cake. That side of the building stood neatly swathed in blue plastic tarps nailed down to the remaining walls with strips of lumber so that the unpredictable winds of a Kentucky autumn couldn’t snatch them away. People clad in white hard hats swarmed over the site and clustered around members of the design team.

      “Hey, look out there!” Janet’s astonished reverie was broken by a crew member’s hand grabbing her elbow just before she would have tripped over a wiggling black cable. It was then that she noticed the cameras. There must have been six of them, shouldered by a camera crew that poked in and out of the clustered workers. Three of them, naturally, were trained on Drew Downing. One cameraman was trying, as gracefully as possible, to get Howard Epson to move so he could shoot the rest of the community’s participation.

      And participate they had. As she began to recognize face after face out of the green-shirted crowd, nearly everyone Janet knew in Middleburg was either helping on the site or watching from the sidewalks. The girls Downing had commissioned to recruit the high school had evidently been quite successful—Janet guessed she was looking at the entire senior class. High school seniors up at seven in the morning on a Saturday? Maybe Downing did have the power of the Almighty working on his behalf.

      Or, more likely, the glare of the television lights.

      As if he’d heard her thoughts, Drew Downing began walking in her direction. With two cameras in tow. I knew it’d get like this.

      “Did you ever think you’d see a hardware spectacle?” Drew asked, pulling a measuring tape off his tool belt and depositing it on a table beside him with an unceremonious thunk. “I love demolition day. It’s more fun than anyone should be allowed to have on television.”

      And that, Janet thought, is just the point. Demolition was serious, even dangerous business. She hoped Missionnovation took safety as seriously as entertainment.

      “You’ve come just in time—this ought to be fabulous. Ever pull a wall down before?”

      “Yes,” Janet said without any hint of excitement.

      Drew pointed at her. “With your bare hands?” He thrust his hands into a large box to his left and pulled out a white hard hat with the green Missionnovation logo. He held it out to Janet.

      “C’mon, lend a hand,” Downing said, offering the hat with a gigawatt smile. “You might have a bit of fun if you’re not careful. But don’t worry, we’re careful, too.” He motioned toward the line of people gathering across from a trio of ropes that were tied to the church’s remaining West wall.

      “We’ve decided to replace the church’s entire roof for you, too,” he said as they began walking. “Kevin’s got an idea to create a garden outside the school windows. It’ll even have a miniature cistern to retain rainwater. You know, teach the kids about ecology and water preservation.”

      Okay, perhaps it was a little impressive. The church had been in dire