Passages

I used to be a chairmaker.

A traditional woodworker.
Went out into the woods. Cut down a tree. Hauled it home.
Brought out the wedges and sledge hammer. Split it into lengths.
Then over to the hickory brake and split them smaller with the froe.
Threw the pieces in a pile of wet shavings and went in for dinner.

I sat at the shaving horse and used my drawknife to shave the blanks up into chair parts.
Wood still nice and wet and kept buried in the growing pile of shavings to keep it that way.
When the best of that log was shaved up it was time for mortising.
The duck bill spoon bits that Peter gave me were fine but not up to the task of major production so I used flat bits in my brace.
Holes up one side and down the other and slat mortises to accept the slats carved with quotations and designs from women wiser than myself.

Throw the rungs in the oven. Dry them out. Then up and down the basement stairs in a sprint.
Clamp and get the next panel ready. Rip the arms out of walnut. Final assembly.
Carve the date and my signature in the bottom rungs and you have a chair.
Wet posts shrink and lock as they dry.
Strong enough still to hold Isaac, now 11. This, the high chair made at his birth.

Now I paint chairs.

There is a powerful lesson in making a chair from a tree. It is strong soulful work.
I came to use only wood that was being felled for some unreasonable human reason
but was too good for the firewood pile. A continuation of it’s life.
Grown to maturity and cut down in it’s prime.
Making of it’s splendor a resting place for generations.
There are almost five hundred of my chairs out there.
And if just three people sit or rock in each one in it’s life time…

From the Kimono which I discovered recently is entirely stitched by hand and therefore perhaps
centuries old, to Burnell’s walking stick left for me on his back porch after he had been taken away, to
Isaac’s high chair and the many babies who have sat in their own, to the tea cup.
A vessel for the spirits of all the ages.
A right
of
Passages.