At the moment, I am enjoying some construction work getting done in my home.

No, that’s a lie. I can’t say I “enjoy” it; “endure” is probably the better word.

This work desperately needs to be done — the old window in our bedroom was letting in more rain with every successive Nor’easter, and I will definitely enjoy having a new, waterproof window.  But in the meantime, I’m a nervous wreck.

I try to strike the right balance between standing at the workman’s elbow and yipping, “Are you sure you have to cut this hole in my house?” and running out of the house entirely. I have learned, from previous experience, that I should keep myself busy just out of sight in case someone needs to find the fusebox or needs my car to be moved.  But the truth is for the entire time I am as jittery and jumpy as a Weimaraner puppy during fireworks.

I have tried to call upon my background of working in television — specifically on location shoots. During those, I watched people lugging equipment, and rigging up lighting, and assembling stuff, and generally taking what seemed to be a ridiculous amount of time, and we’re still nowhere near ready to start, but I don’t dare ask,“Why is it taking so long?” Or things are sure to take twice as long the next time.

Nowadays, I use a book of Sudoku puzzles — something I can work on, but put down at a moment’s notice without losing my place. (I can lose my place even in something as simple as knitting) But I’m still a bundle of nerves. Cranky nerves.

“Why are you so nervous anyway?” my husband asks me. “Even if they make a mistake, they’re not likely to do anything that somebody else couldn’t fix.”

“I can’t explain it,” I tell him. But suddenly I see an image of a carpenter, from a long-ago memory, swinging his hammer and putting it through the Sheetrock of my parents’ dining room wall.

This, I must add, was NOT a mistake. It was what the man and his crew had been hired to do.

“When I was little,” I told my husband, “my parents decided they wanted to turn around the basement stairs in our house, so that instead of going down into my father’s workroom near the furnace, they would end up in the newly furnished family den.”

This apparently required putting a new doorway into what was our dining room wall.

Of course, there must have been some discussions before the big day, “but all I remember was that as soon as that hammer hit that wall, my dad went ballistic, yelling ‘Hey, wait a minute! Is this strictly necessary? Are you quite sure you’re doing this right?’ All that, in spite of the fact that the poor man was only doing precisely what Dad had hired him to do.”

“I’m beginning to get the picture,” my husband murmured.

“So the next thing I remember was my dad putting on his coat and taking me to the hardware store. It was some kind of emergency, because the carpenter needed a bag of nails.”

“So it was you and your dad, both, who were sent on this emergency mission?”

“Yes. And I have never understood what was so special about those nails.”

That all happened more than 50 years ago, but the memory is still fresh. As  I watched the crew that we had hired working on my own house, I had a new thought.

“It finally occurs to me,” I told my husband, “all these years later — what kind of a carpenter comes to a job without nails?”

“That’s a good question,” my spouse replied, trying to hide a smile. “What is your answer?”

“Well, I don’t know. You don’t think they were just getting Dad out of the way?”

“Oh, your dad? Maybe. But it gives me an idea — why don’t we see if there’s anything at our own hardware store right now that we could use?”

Luckily for me, our local hardware store has kitchen goods, and curtain rods, and beach towels, and all kinds of handy things besides nails and wrenches. It definitely took the edge off my case of nerves. I bought quite a lot.

Now it’s my husband’s turn to be nervous.