My father stands at the top of a five-foot ladder, nailing rafters to the frame we’ve erected for the horses’ new tack shed. A breeze lifts salt off the Atlantic and scatters the loose hay in the paddocks . The sun is bright and the sky is clear on this summer day. Small beads of sweat form on the balding crown of his head and he wipes them away from time to time. He is fifty-two and works without thinking, his hands and arms moving automatically to raise this small shed.

Weekends aren’t his only lumber-filled days; he has made a living driving nails into wood — and overseeing the younger men who now drive nails into wood for him — for 30 years.

Construction was never the plan, however: Cornell, ornithological studies, and a professorship might have filled his life if the draft, his father’s sudden heart attack, a widowed mother and 12 fatherless younger siblings hadn’t intervened. Those were some of the things that picked him up from his boyhood dreams and slammed him down on the road to an unimagined manhood.

I am 12 and today we are alone with our work. My mother, brother and sister are somewhere else, maybe at the beach or at home gardening, but they are not here. I’m bracing the ladder for him and watching his wrist swing loosely with each stroke.

If you swing from the elbow, he tells me, you’ll cramp up in minutes. But if you swing from the wrist, if you let the shock of impact travel up your hand and lose itself in the general motion, you can hammer all day long. A loose wrist will keep your arm from burning; it will soften the blow and you won’t even notice you’ve been hammering for hours. Or decades.

It is late afternoon when my father says “Will, I’ve been thinking of a story you should write.” He holds out his callused hand and I pass more nails. The force of the hammer hitting the nails sends out a smack and the beams vibrate. My eyes close involuntarily with each stoke even though I try to keep them open, watching my father work. “It’s a simple story,” he continues, “just a slice of life, but I think it’ll be a good exercise for you.”

I don’t make a habit of writing stories. I like to write. I dream of being a writer, but sometimes my father talks like I am a writer and he is my editor, and I am not just his young daughter passing him nails and holding up two-by-fours.

When I compose essays for class, he says “death to all modifiers,” or “avoid absolutes,” or simply quotes Norman Maclean’s father from A River Runs Through It, praising my efforts but asking for another, cleaner draft, “half as long.”

If I tell him it is only an essay for a sixth grade class, that it is already better than all of my classmates’ will be and is more than the teacher asked for, he says, “Do the maximum, Willa, never the minimum.”

Today, my father challenges me to fiction. “My Time” is the name of the tale he says I should write, and for the next half hour he hammers and tells me a story he’s been writing in his head for months, or perhaps years.

It is a quiet, simple story — a “slice of life” he calls it —  and in it, a girl must walk home from her bus stop. It’s a two mile walk, but the rural, wooded road turns out to be full of silent moments, small treasures. Her initial disappointment at being forgotten at the bus stop flares into anger, then ebbs into reflection, and resolves in gratitude: in making her walk home, her father has given her the gift of her own time.

The road in the story is not the one we actually live on, but it is close enough. When the girl stops halfway home to examine a bird house and check for new occupants, it doesn’t surprise me; in real life my father has built many such houses and hung them along the road, hoping to attract tree swallows, screech owls, or crested flycatchers. The girl, too, is familiar. She is not quite me, but might as well be, the only real difference between us being that she has no mother.

As my father speaks, I think about her, about her curiosity, brief temper, and thoughtfulness. I wonder if my father has sculpted her as a one-parent version of me, or as a female version of himself.

Regardless, it is a beautiful story. Each word he speaks is perfect, polished and magnificent. I think, secretly to myself as I stand and steady his ladder, that I will never write this story. He has already mastered the telling of it, and I cannot imagine stringing words together as deftly as he does.

He must know it is a good story, a gift to me, but he finishes and says, “Anyway, that’s just the gist of it. You’re better at this than me; you could make it into something great. Think about that road and then write it in your own words.”

Nearly a decade later we will drive through New England to my college campus, which is not Cornell but is close enough to his dream, and which I will attend without interruption.

We will follow the Connecticut River north to New Hampshire and he will grow giddy in the driver’s seat and say, “I can imagine the press release now: ‘Dr. Willa Johann announces her multimedia project on the Connecticut River. Accompanying her geological study will be a novel of historical fiction set on its banks during the great flood of ’36, a book of watercolors, and an album of songs inspired by the Quabbin Reservoir. Her thematically-relevant one-woman play will debut shortly.’”

He will laugh, his watery blue eyes sparkling and his head shining in the sunlight. He will look out the window, see the river flashing by between the trees, and say “Man, I’m getting excited just thinking about this: a historical, anthropological, scientific and artistic study of the Connecticut River, by Dr. Johann. It’s going to be fascinating.”

But that moment is still in the future and neither of us yet know how many of his steps I will retrace on my way toward the life he coveted; today, we are just building. When we finish the rafters, we lay down the plywood and work past dinnertime until the daylight is gone and there is nothing to do but hay the horses and go home.

The next weekend, we resume work, hauling a roll of tar paper up onto the roof and stapling it down. Then we put in a row of windows and attach the door. Materials have been culled from the leftovers at his jobsites and the final product is a simple but sleek shed with space for 14 saddles, pads, bridles, halters, brushes, boots and medical supplies.

As we finish the interior detailing, the shelves and racks, my father asks if I’ve started my story yet. I tell him it is not my story to write.

The truth is, I tried to write it. I sat down with my notebook and wrote several opening lines: “As the bus rounded the corner, I craned my neck to see the stop, hoping my father’s green pickup truck would be idling there,” and “My father forgot to pick me up from the bus stop today. Again.”

I erased and rewrote, erased and rewrote. I read my attempts out loud, like he taught me, but they all sounded stiff and clunky, not at all like the story he’d told me. I sat there and couldn’t get the image of him standing in the sun out of my head, the story streaming from his whiskered lips as he drove in nails.

My father disagrees with me, says it is entirely my story to write. I hold one end of the tape measure along the wall while he makes marks so that the bridle hooks will be evenly spaced. I don’t know how to tell him that my pen is no match for blank paper and the task he has given me.

I ask him why he doesn’t write “My Time”; it seems like all he needs to do is type it out.

“No, no” he says, and shakes a stiffness out of his hand. “I’m just a carpenter. You could make it something great.” He draws himself up, stretching his back and sucking in a sharp breath that says something, somewhere, twinges.

He asks me to finish nailing in the hooks. I take one nail in my hand and put the rest between my teeth. He passes me the hammer; it is so heavy, but I take it into my palm and eye the head of the nail. I concentrate on keeping my wrist loose and my eyes open, and driving the nail into the wall with the same skill and power as my father.

Then, I lift the hammer and swing.

Willa Johann grew up in Montauk, New York, the setting for this essay. As a child, she and her family lived briefly in Canton where they still own property; she visits Maine often. A 2010 graduate of Dartmouth College, Johann is now pursuing a masters degree at the University of New Hampshire in creative nonfiction writing. Her father, Edward Johann, 64, lives and writes in Montauk.