Reader, commenter, and dare I say friend, Shoreacres purchased one of my Evangeline Tables today, (Many thanks to everyone that did!) and supplied a link to one of her essays that also touched on the poem Evangeline. She wrote it a few years back, but Longfellow never goes stale. It’s eleventy times more interesting than my essay, and there’s good music in the comments, too. Go!
When I was little, I went to parochial school. I don’t think they call them that any more. The nuns were very kind — still dressed in full penguin togs and fingering their beads by the hour. They read to us. We read Longfellow. Evangeline
Ye who believe in affection that hopes, and endures, and is patient,
Ye who believe in the beauty and strength of woman’s devotion,
List to the mournful tradition still sung by the pines of the forest;
List to a Tale of Love in Acadie, home of the happy.
Longfellow was from Maine, and lived in the first brick house in Portland. The whole town is brick now. It’s a fitting metaphor for his life. He was one of those people whose work was so accessible and popular that eventually no one wanted it any more. It can’t be any good — everyone likes it. I still like it.
I don’t create things as much as I’d like. I make things, which is honorable, and gratifying, but it is not always the “whole” thing –the process from soup to nuts, concept to sticks and bricks. I wanted to make the whole thing for a change.
I had this raw material. I’d purchased a pile of flame birch many years ago. It’s the king of all American woods, if you ask me. Hard as a banker’s heart, and beautiful as a girl that won’t talk to you. I tucked it away to do something with it — eventually. Eventually is a terrible word in my life now. There was potential in the rough planks of wood that could be brought to bear for the right project. But what?
Creation is the whole thing, as I said. I set up my lathe again. I like the lathe. It’s quiet. I don’t have to put a vise on my head to use it. It’s not a rote operation, ever, even when making the same leg over again. My little son said, “Daddy is sculpting again.” I adored that. I was. But more, I was thinking. I was trying. I was striving to make something, the whole thing.
What to do with flame birch? Shakers used it once in a while. But I was not thinking spartan. The wood is the hardest stuff America produces. I was thinking of the forests from whence it came. I was thinking of Acadie. And so I thought of Longfellow, and Evangeline.
It was going to be a nineteenth century table, the legs would have tulips for their toes, and the wild, iridescent grain would be revealed, but somehow tamed by the soft shapes of the turnings. The heaviness of the forest would be transformed into something sophisticated and delicate. I went back and forth over dimensions, proportions. I made it small enough to seem delicate, but big enough to be elegant and useful. I think I made it beautiful, but that is not for me to say.
There is a statue of Evangeline in Nova Scotia. It is where my father’s family came from, and the statue was made by a sculptor who used the actress my mother is named for as a model. So I had this whole idea, a mishmash brought together into an object.
The table has a look of unreality to it. The grain flips from dark to light when you walk past it. It becomes a negative of itself and then goes back again as you move. It’s like tortoiseshell. I made it for my Father, who is gone, and my Mother, who I do not see often enough, and for Acadie, and for the nuns that read Evangeline to me.
I cannot keep it because there’s nothing wrong with it. We can only keep the things that aren’t right somehow. You can buy it. It’s not on my furniture website right now, so my readers can see it first, here. This table is either the first one, or the only one; I’m not sure which yet. But I must put it out in the world because it’s the best thing I’ve done, and there is no eventually for me any more.
$399.00, Ready to ship. Free shipping to anywhere in the lower 48 states. 16″ x 16″ x 27″ high.
[UPDATE: Sold to Bob in Missouri. Why do I have so many friends in Missouri? I don’t know, but I’m glad of it. Thanks, Bob]
[Saturday Update: Due to the overwhelming interest in this item, I’ve decided to accept orders for Evangeline Tables here on my blog. They’ll be ready for shipment approximately six weeks after you place your order. Many thanks to all my friends for their kind words and their interest in Sippican Cottage. Still $399 each, free shipping included]
Buy one now:
My Intertunnel friends sure are swell.
We’re grateful to everyone that reads, and comments, and corresponds, and to everyone that’s purchased a copy of my book, and purchased my Maine-made cottage furniture, and thrown my minstrel boys some coins, and people that have used the Amazon links on this page. Your friendship and support have meant the world to me and my family.
Our friends at 32 Degrees North sent our boys two beautiful Advent calendars. The little feller especially is a calendar freak, and they both enjoy the old-fashioned thrill of turning over the flaps on the way to Christmas. Thanks for being kind to my boys! Everyone should go over to their Intershop and grab everything before they run out of Christmas. Nice people should buy things from other nice people. And it wouldn’t kill you to read her blog, either: Daughter of the Golden West.
It snowed last night, and when I made a fire this morning it was 10 degrees outside, so we’re thinking of visiting Santa at his place because it might be warmer there.
True to the quote on the masthead, we’re all over the map here at Sippican Cottage. But every once in a while I suffer a blow to the head, or some other pleasant diversion, and it reminds me to talk about what I’m doing all day when I should be answering my email. I make furniture.
I’ve made a lot of furniture over the last eight years. Hundreds and hundreds of pieces. The business is like a bicycle, and you keep pedaling while looking at your feet, and lose track of the landscape a little. I should know, but I don’t know how many states I’ve sent the stuff to at this point. There’s a little hole in the middle of the country that are strangers to me, still. I’ve never seen a Yeti, or a customer from North or South Dakota. They must live indoors there now; don’t they need furniture? I don’t know. I wish them well all the same, and lurk in the Intertunnel’s bushes, waiting to pounce on them if they pass by.
I’ve made some furniture that’s ended up in England and Canada, too, but I don’t sell furniture there. People bought it here in the states and took it with them and told me about it. Really nice people in Canada (are there another kind of people in Canada?) have offered to buy things from me fairly often if I could figure out all the paperwork. I couldn’t, so I haven’t. I know you can’t tell by reading what I write, but I’m not a dullard. It just requires more time than I have to figure it out properly, and is fraught with peril for a very small business like mine. One has to be conservative in your behavior to stay alive in the world of commerce these days. Many things are worth doing but there is no time. Maybe later.
I am ashamed to admit that I don’t even have pictures of all the stuff I make. I’ve put a lot of stuff into boxes with the muttered oath: I wish I’d taken a picture of that. If the camera battery is dead or the FedEx man’s arrival is nigh or it’s pitch dark or something, it goes out, and many times, out of my memory.
But lovely reader and commenter Leslie purchased a pair of tables last month — or was it the month before; what day is it? — and I managed to take a picture of them before they went the way of all lignin and cellulose and corrugated cardboard. I thought they were awful pretty. I made them for her special in all tiger maple with Pumpkin stain. Tiger maple is endlessly interesting stuff. No two pieces of it are quite the same, and so, they’re endlessly interesting to look at and challenging to work with. Leslie even found time to send me a snapshot of the little four-legged buggers in her home way out west where they don’t shovel. Lovely!
My business is sometimes anonymous, but less so than it used to be because I socialize with many customers here on my Intertunnel Logos Stand. It’s always piquant to see the things I make in their natural habitat, because a workshop is not the natural habitat of such things. Your house is.
I’m grateful to everyone that reads, and those that leave comments, and link here, and purchase things from Amazon through my portal which throws me a few bucks which we sorely need and appreciate, and everyone that’s kind to my children, and everyone that buys the furniture. I love you all more than my folks.
The commendable fellow in the video is making: treenware.
treen, small wooden objects
in daily domestic or farm use and in use in trades and professions.
Treen includes a wide variety of objects mostly associated with
tableware, the kitchen, games, personal adornment, and toilet articles.
The word is never applied to objects larger than a spinning wheel and
does not include objects designed primarily for ornament. (Britannica)
When I see an ironic-looking fellow sporting muttonchop sidewhiskers and pedaling a single-speed bike, wearing Clark Kent glasses, with a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon under his arm, unstructured scarf flapping in the breeze, I’m often reminded of people like our pole lathe turner. I wonder if anyone else is.
People seek authenticity in their lives. Authenticity is often equated with simplicity. Steve Jobs glommed onto the idea of never showing any screws on the outside of his wares to give the user the impression of a monolithic apparatus, not a machine. It’s fake simplicity, but so what? As they say, If you don’t have good manners, pretend you do; it’s the same thing.
Counterintuitively, simplicity also lends itself to originality in manufacture. You’d think that a lack of ornament would limit uniqueness. And that fellow is trying to make everything exactly the same way, every time — but he’s failing utterly and wonderfully. A human can’t do the exact same thing twice like a machine can, and the wood wouldn’t allow uniformity anyway; no two pieces of wood are identical. Everything you make is one-of-a-kind. I’ve made hundreds of tables. No two of them are remotely the same. I’ll go further, and aver that each has a kind of personality, revealed in working on them. They all have opinions about the weather, and think they have a “good side,” like a teenager being photographed. The pieces of a table will fight with you if you don’t listen to them.
People can’t all make everything for themselves, or there would only be room for a few million people on earth. But the urge is there, a kind of respect, and straphangers use the power of their purses to rub elbows with authenticity as a worthy substitute for doing it themselves.
(thanks to reader and commenter and customer and friend JHC for sending that one along)
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