Winters aren’t hard in Maine where I live. They’re not harsh. They’re not long. Adjectives like hard, harsh, and long don’t help describe the thing. What winter is here is A Fact.
Before we moved here, winter was not A Fact in my life. I lived in various places in Massachusetts, but you could basically pretend winter was just a few nasty weeks left over from fall, or a ghastly beginning to spring, but you didn’t really have to pay attention to it in any meaningful way. I went years without owning an ice scraper, or having a proper winter coat. You could just sort of clap your hands over your ears and sing la la la for about two weeks in January and pretend it didn’t matter.
They’ll find you in the spring in western Maine if you pretend winter doesn’t exist. You’re not going anywhere, and you’re not doing anything without paying attention to it when it shows up. And you’re not staying home, either, without paying winter’s attention vigorish. If the power went out in Massachusetts, we’d have a jolly fire in the ornamental fireplace, made entirely from cardboard and bits of cut-off wood left over from building the house, and wait for the television to be restored. If the power goes off overnight in Maine in January, you’ve got about four hours to do something about it before the water in the toilet bowl turns to slush. I have a back-up plan for heat, and a back-up plan for that plan, too, and I’m probably considered woefully unprepared by my wiser neighbors. But I do get the concept, so elegantly put by my dead neighbor, E. B. White: just to live in winter is a full time job.
Of course he lived on the coast, where’s it’s warm and doesn’t snow much. I live over by Mount Washington. It’s west of here, about an hour and a half’s drive –and a bit southerly.
An old man lies in a hospital bed, dying of nothing. His son sits in a chair fit for a lobby and waits. The snow slants down outside the window. It’s collected in the corners, where the brick meets the sash, and formed a kind of porthole into a world gone beneath a winding sheet.
Some sort of machine wheezes and sighs. Every voice is a murmur like a pew near a confessional. The son wonders if there’s any noise of life in this place. No tinkle of a fork on a plate. No hammering of seconds on a clock. Music has never entered the building, and never will. The memory of the jarring blast of metal bells on the old man’s phone in his walkup parlor would sound like a calliope here. Everything that passes sounds like a black mariah, the horses with burlap on their hooves.
The old man says nothing, just looks at his son, and begins to cry. His son can’t help it, he begins to cry, too. They cry for the same reason. The son doesn’t want to be left alone in this world. The father is afraid to leave his son alone in the world he’s made for him.
Haven’t written much lately. Mi dispiace. I’ve been working day and night for weeks on end.
There’s a picture of a batch of Evangeline Tables that went out this week. Some had gone out earlier, and some customers have asked me to hold others until later dates for one reason or another. It was fun to see a half-dozen of them lined up at a time. Thanks to everyone that bought one. I hope you like them. It was gratifying making them. I’d make more, but I used all the flame birch material I had. Not sure when I’ll be able to get more like that. I admit that I was a little befuddled that I was able to make tables that look like those. I didn’t think I was capable of such a thing.
They do not look like a machine made them. You can tell that they are made by a person. That’s a double-edged sword. Some people might think that objects that look like a person made them would be a kind of defect. Our machine age brooks no competition from the apes. But no one that reads my blog thinks that the evidence of the hand of the person that made a thing detracts from the item itself — just the opposite, I imagine. It’s interesting to make 32 turned legs at a time, and try to make them all the same. Exactly the same kind of different, is more like it.
This winter has been beastly. Really cold weather started really early in the year, and never let up. Snowed a lot, too. My wife and son and I had to shovel for two days straight last week, after a blizzard, just to get a truck in and accept the cardboard I use to package furniture. Everything is uphill both ways this time of year.
I’m also making a big table for Julie and her family, who reads and comments here. It’s taking too long to finish it. It’s been too cold in my shop to finish a table that big properly. The small ones you just bring by the woodstove and there’s no problem, or bring them upstairs into the house. There is an old saying about commerce: I am your friend, but my business doesn’t know you. I am Julie’s friend but my business hasn’t known her properly. The winter’s back is broken now, and the table won’t be long now. I will not sleep properly until it goes, and until the one I’m making for my friend Arlan is done, too. Unfinished business keeps a man up at night.
I have all sorts of odds and ends that have collected since last fall in an alcove outside my children’s bedrooms. It’s a neat little spot, a dormer with a window built entirely to bring light into what would be a very dark hallway otherwise. Whenever something gets made that doesn’t have a home right away, it goes there. It’s the best furnished room in my house, and it isn’t a room, and no one goes there. It’s time to empty it out and use the proceeds to buy food, or fritter it away on other silly things like that.
Here’s an experimental Console Table. It’s two inches less wide than my regular size. It’s 14 x 32 by 28 inches high. Honey Pot. My wife is starting to look at it funny — the same look she gave the stray cat that’s lived with us for over a decade after the look. Time to get it out of here. $399 includes free shipping:
Honey Pot Console:
SOLD! Thanks, Emily in Virginia
Here’s another of the experimental sized Console Tables. This one is dyed cinnamon. 14 x32 x 28 inches high. $399 includes free shipping.
Cinnamon Cottage Console:
SOLD! to old friend Ruth Anne down Carolina way. Many thanks!
I’ve got two splay-legged tiger maple Kipling Tables. They’re very strikingly grained. The snapshot camera I’ve got doesn’t do them justice. They’re both stained cinnamon. $199 each, includes free shipping.
Kipling Table 1 in cinnamon stain:
SOLD! Off to the the Pacific Northwest
Kipling Table 2 in cinnamon stain:
Here’s a solid quartersawn white oak Shamrock Table. The top is very wildly grained, but the lighting isn’t too good for the photo. 15x15x28 inches high. $249 includes free shipping
White oak Shamrock Table in cinnamon stain:
SOLD! Thanks, Julie in Florida
I used to make an item called an owl house. They featured it in Cottages and Bunglaows magazine, IIRC. I made three simplified versions of the old design. No steeple. It’s entirely made of clear pine, with a cedar roof. It’s painted with exterior paint. The interior is left raw, like birds like it, and there’s a “ladder” that goes from the floor to the hole for fledglings to climb to get out to learn to fly. You can pull two pins on the sides and the bottom swings open to clean out a nest. It’s really rather large: 14x11x21 inches high, with a 3 inch hole. The box and hole is sized for small owls and larger birds. In Maine, we have saw-whet owls, which are dreadfully cute. $99 each, includes free shipping.
Owl House in bog red:
Owl House in green:
Owl House in Verdigris:
SOLD! to Kevin in Philly. Many thanks.
I have really nice neighbors here in Maine. I gave some birdhouses last year to some ladies that live downa street. They know all about birds, and they got bluebirds to nest in the houses. Marvelous. Bluebirds are hard to attract, but they tend to stay where they like it, and attract others. You can put bluebird houses in a row, like along a fencerow, for instance, and they move in. I tried doubling down on my luck. Here’s a bluebird house with three compartments. Each compartment is entirely separate from the others, and they’re all exactly the size of the bluebird-approved houses I made. Birds, except martins, don’t really like to live together, but the two end houses face away from one another, and the one in the middle faces forward. Bluebirds will live back-to-back with other birds. There are no perches; bluebirds like diving straight into the holes. The back roof unscrews to clean it out. The back has false windows, too. It’s made from pine. The inside isn’t painted. Birds hate paint inside their houses. It’s 8 x 16 x 9 inches tall, with three 1-3/8 inch holes. $49 includes free shipping.
Bluebird house in white:
SOLD! Thanks, Linda in Tejas
Well, that’s the lot. If you like anything, hit the buttons. If you like more than one thing, you’ll have to buy each separately, because there’s no “Shopping Cart” for these Buy Now buttons. If the button disappears, that means someone else beat you to it. But don’t worry about my family and me if you don’t see anything to your liking. Whatever doesn’t sell I’ll burn for firewood. Hey, a BTU’s a BTU.
It’s ten degrees, but it won’t last. The sun is retreating and dragging the thermometer with it. The violet days are here.
There was a moment before sunset when the sky and the earth and everything in, on, and between them turned this lovely purple hue. It’s an indescribable color. Light through a lens fashioned from a limpid pool, frozen. It can’t mean anything but cold to my eye. I don’t know how many bedrooms I’ve seen painted this color. It’s arctic looking, and the person that chose it always told me it was, you know ” a warm color.” Yes, it is, in the same way a walrus butthole planted on a floe is warm. To a lunatic, it might be warm.
But cold as a concept is not as bad as many make it. It is a fact, here. It will be below zero, day and night, for three days in a row. It will be ten, fifteen, maybe push twenty below zero at night. Winter is not fooling around anymore. So what.
Winter is a full time job in Maine, E. B. White said. But he lived Downeast, where it’s warm compared to here. But he understood. You have to look it straight in the face, and deal with it. You can’t go out in your socks and scrape the frost from your windshield with a credit card. I’ve made over 500 fires already, and I’ve only used one match, once, to do it. You have to prepare yourself for winter. It reminds you that you’re mortal, and that there are seasons, and those seasons have meaning. It shows you that your life will pass you by if you’re not careful. Winter is useful that way.
I see a great number of people talking about how they’re going to deal with a coming apocalypse. They’re going to hoard this and grow that. They’re going to be the Omega Man crossed with Johnny Appleseed. Forgive me, but life is plenty hard here, and I can’t help but notice you’re not moving in next door to me before the apocalypse. I doubt you will the day after. If winter is too much for you, I doubt you’re prepared for an army of zombie Robespierres or whatever it is you’re planning for.
I can’t say I like the winter. I’ve always been cold. Poor people are often cold, and I have been poor in my life. I’m not a fool and I don’t like misery. But I respect the winter here. It’s a worthy adversary, and so, goddamn it, am I. Bring it on.
Tag: winter
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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