A visit to the Taos leatherworker's bench, where her grandfather's tools still hold court.
Marisol Torres' studio smells like leather and oil and time. The walls are lined with tools — some inherited, some collected, all of them worn smooth by use. On her workbench sits her grandfather's awl, a tool that has cut leather for three generations.
"I still use my grandfather's awl," she tells me, holding it up to the light. "Every strap I cut, I think about how many hands it's passed through. There's a conversation between the tool and the hide that I'm just lucky to witness."
Working with vegetable-tanned leather is a slow process. There are no shortcuts, no industrial techniques that will speed it up. Each piece is cut by hand, stitched by hand, finished by hand. Marisol spends weeks on a single satchel, and when she's done, it's an object that will outlive her.
"People ask me why my work costs so much," she says. "But they're not paying for leather. They're paying for decades of learning. They're paying for my grandfather's knowledge, passed down through his hands to mine. That's not something you can rush."