The Mark of Consistency

My Uncle Scott had these sock tan lines, which is not the most poetic place to start, but... here we are.

Grief does this strange thing where it hands you details. So, of all the things I could be thinking about right now, I keep returning to his feet.

The sock tan lines were so perfectly even it was almost absurd.

As if he'd worn socks that cut off mid-calf so consistently his skin had accepted it as law. When he was barefoot lakeside, you could see this solid demarcation where the sun had been and where it hadn't.

They were bold. Not loud. Just... undeniable.

You don't get tan lines like that by accident.

You get them by showing up the same way over and over and over again.

He spent most of his life building things out of wood.

I didn't spend time in his workshop. I never watched him sand something down or measure a board. So, I don't actually know how he worked wood.

What I do know is how he worked a room.

Slowly.

He never rushed a conversation. He never filled space just to fill it. When we did banjo lessons over Zoom, he would wait. He'd listen. Sometimes there would be this long stretch of quiet while I fumbled through something. He didn't rescue it. He let it breathe.

Somewhere in the middle of grief and gratitude, a phrase for that steadiness landed in me – care slower.

But the phrase isn't the point. The way he moved is.

There's something about consistency that doesn't look flashy while it's happening. It looks ordinary. It looks like socks. It looks like a man sitting in a chair with a banjo, patiently going over the same roll again and again.

But over time?

Consistency leaves a mark.

Calluses.

Confidence.

Breadth and depth.

Tan lines.

Memory.