Month: November 2018

NOT BOX

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The “Not Box” made from a single narrow board in 1974.

I felt the cold coming on Monday night. I tried to convince myself it was nerves. It is my first real sickness since I retired.

On the 7th of July, I put money down on a desk that I had been saving for since the year before. On the 7th of November, they finally came and picked up the desk that had sat unused for three weeks. It was not what I wanted, not what I ordered. Wood this shop calls “Western Walnut” is sourced on my coast and every example on their website shows wild, dark chocolate, purply grain. Deep. Rich. I showed the salesman exactly what I wanted. What I received was a beautiful desk of milk straight grain like milk chocolate teak. It about broke my heart. (It will look fine in some trendy mid-century modern house—I’ve no doubt it will sell once it’s on display in their shop.) They tried to make it good, but not hard enough. I am sorry for this very expensive lesson learned, $620 at least to ship it here and back, and yes, I am expected to pay both ways. If they try to bill me for restocking too, I suppose I will shriek.

Wood grain and color is variable, unreliable, as I know from experience. The appearance of rough cut hardwood lumber can be deceptive. Picture cedar fence board—that is the surface, splintery and dull—and wetting the wood gives a hint of its finish color. The only way to be sure is to plane it smooth.

In college I went down to the Seattle warehouses to sort through rough hardwood boards. Stacks leaning against the wall and into racks in rows. I found a single rough maple board that would reveal tiny knots, a pattern called birdseye maple. The “eyes” are tiny knots, and such boards are generally sliced thin and used as veneer. Constructing even a small object out of solid birdseye seems a little wasteful, but it’s what I did in college. I ran it through the planner to find the pattern and then designed and built an object to use every scrap of one small, narrow rough board. I made a “Not-Box”, a single drawer in a box with a stripe of black ebony, a precious strip of black wood, also purchased rough and planed to 1/8th inch. I have the leftover ebony, barely two inches wide and a foot long, still flat and true, smooth and hard as glass after all these years. I think, sometimes, of make=ing something of it. I could score lines and create a ruler.

I bought walnut too, back in those woodshop days, choosing boards in the rough and no certainty about how it will look until I’d run it through the hog. A family friend gave me a fourteen foot “English brown oak” board he’d had nailed to the inside of his workshop for decades. In 1974, my friend and I ran it through the planer in the University of Washington shop. “I want to show you what we did,” said the patient shop foreman who was teaching us how to use tools. There were chips all over the cutting edges. He had never seen oak do that to a planer, what teak can do without using carbide steel. Later my son would use some of that wood to fashion a guitar in high school.

I made a walnut triptych frame for cloisonné enamel and an ash bench which I have never used. My joints were never perfect. Wood is not forgiving of error. Even metal can be reworked, and I was raising sterling from a flat disk into a tall, narrow vessel at the same time I was making mistakes I could not correct in wood.

I know about wood.

This morning I feel better, though I was lying in bed when they picked up that desk yesterday. (The careful men scarred the walls carrying it up and scarred it again going down, but our narrow staircase has seen worse. I will repaint.) I had not left the house since the previous morning. Our granddaughter does not know how to talk on the phone. I have managed over 12k words for NaNo, thought I think I wrote only 149 words yesterday. I have not been knitting or weaving or piecing, and only a little reading. I have slept. I have avoided the news. It is not good enough.

This morning I feel better. My throat is not so sore and I can breathe through my nose. Better, not well. Gary wants me to stay home today. He tries to take care of me, but the Senior Research Papers are due tomorrow, so I will head to school early this afternoon, just in case.

Gulls are running across the roof.

I might get a walk today. A light run used to be my cure for a cold.

THE PLANS

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My first panettone. 

Last night I started the dough for panettone. This morning I mixed the dough and set it to rise, and that’s when the trouble started.

An hour before they went into the oven, Gary had plans. “Bring your breakfast and I will hold things up. You don’t even have to touch it. Just say yes or no,” he said.

My husband was determined this past summer to empty our attic, the spaces north and south behind the knee wall. He was entirely successful. The spaces are empty, the roof only barely leaking, and most of the contents given away. Most.

What is left? A stack of “old” good stuff for our son to sell on Ebay and a dozen or so cardboard bankers boxes with “school stuff” I will never use again. There was also a fair-sized cardboard box with rolls of plans and prints of plans and my original plans drawn on translucent paper. There had been another box of these, or perhaps two boxes. I thought I’d rescued all the architectural plans I needed or wanted to keep, but then he unrolled plans for a house I’d forgotten I designed. I remembered it only vaguely from those years I was designing additions to coastal dwellings and entire houses.

There were many more than I recalled: homes and home additions in Gearhart, Little Beach, Tolovana Park, Cannon Beach, Arch Cape, and Falcon Cove. This began in 1983 when I was a new mother with preschool children when our tenant asked if I could make an architectural model. I said, Of course, though I had never done anything of the sort before. My model was the wrong scale and clumsy, but it satisfied the homeowner who was leery of a roofline redesigned to meet a local covenant. She was pleased enough to ask me to design the interior, with the architect’s blessing. He was glad to be shut of this difficult client.

That first project led to work for several homeowners, architects, contractors, and myself too over the next ten or twelve years. I designed and supervised the building of my brother’s home and my mother’s. Neither paid me, and I missed work to complete them, but sacrifice is expected of daughters. I tiled the entry, kitchen backsplash, and the tub surround, floor and wall of Mom’s house. I had to quit my job to get it all done, but she was hysterical most of that time. The contractor went far, far over budget. (It would be years before I understood how little that contractor cared about honest billing.)

The houses I am most fond of were the Buckley House in Tolovana Park and my mother’s house on Jefferson Street in the Presidential Streets of Cannon Beach. I have not passed any of these houses other than my mother’s, which is painful since the new owners remodeled all the charm out of it. I loved that house, and I cannot bear to look at how they ruined it. Mom always promised to leave it to me, but she sold it instead because she liked having cash. It is a sad memory. Perhaps that was what my mother meant when she told me the day she died that she had been cruel to me?

I stopped drawing plans once I was a full time teacher, which paid less, but gave me a steady income and work I enjoyed a great deal. I always thought I would design one more home, from scratch and just for Gary and me, but alas.

In any event, I had forgotten how many projects I completed. The one I live in is good and well, though I find that I changed it from my drawings as we built. The plans tell an interesting story and there a great deal more, what we refer to in the family as “The Big Mess.” That is no fun at all, still a mess in our minds.

The attic is no longer any sort of mess. The atrium, where Gary staged his sorting of attic stuff, is also no longer any sort of mess either with just the two neat stacks destined to leave us permanently. In the house, there are still four original Thonet bentwood chairs labeled 1907, purchased in 1968, when I was in high school. They want recaning and free to a new home. Anyone?

Today, I have begun National Novel Writing Month with 1404 words (so far), somewhat under my goal. And I am supposed to complete knitting the first sleeve for Ruby’s birthday sweater. And really, I would like to curl up with hot chocolate and a slice of panettone.

I made two loaves in pans I had, not proper panettone paper pans, and substituted regular for instant yeast and other things. It was still wonderful!