Jay Bridge is a quiet man, and a thoughtful one. He doesn’t say much, but there is almost always a twinkle in his eyes. We are friends and we balance one another. We have a similar warped and ironic sense of humor, and when we go to lunch,  he doesn’t talk all that much, and I do, so our time together is fun and easy.

I like to get him laughing, he can be serious. I much enjoy his company. Jay is an engineer, he had a long and successful career before deciding to move to the country, raise sheep, and do carpentry and other home restoration and repair work. He works on his own, and has an engineer’s view of the world, he is meticulous and well-organized.

Every afternoon, he has tea, and nothing much will break him out of that time with his wife Judy (even if the house is on fire don’t call Jay when he is having tea.) Jay is a self-contained man, comfortable within himself. And he understands how things work.

We thought of him immediately when we decided to put a Little Free Library on the lawn, not only because he does wonderful work, but we knew he would get the idea. And he did. He spent two weeks building a beautiful Little Free Library, and highly functional as well.

I sat out with Red yesterday and watched him work, he is deliberately and almost frighteningly well organized. We talked and joked (we told Maria we had to lower the library because she was too short and she bought it for a second) I was amazed at how carefully Jay worked and how comfortably.

Although he concentrates on his work, I can somehow distract (or harass) him with some stories. His laugh comes as easily as his smile. We are just comfortable with one another, and I suspect we are each not too comfortable with too many people.

He dug a big hole in the ground with a tool I can’t quite even name, and cut down the pole to the right height, then cut a platform board for the library to rest on and some brackets to keep it secure and straight. I couldn’t do any of these things, and it was like watching border collies herd sheep, a beautiful thing to see, it was a kind of ballet.

The library is quite beautiful and somehow, it has become quite important to us. I expected to pay five or six hundred dollars for this kind of work – it took Jay hours to build and plant in the ground. But he only charged a fraction of that, it was, he said, for the community.

Community is important to Jay, he works tirelessly for non-profit arts groups and is careful to choose work projects that challenge  him or are interesting. Maria and I have been singing his praises all night, we owe the feeling and style of this library to him, he did so much more than he had to do. I just wanted to share that feeling, we are fortunate to know him, he is what community is all about.

And he made our Little Free Library happen.