Filed under: Family
The stars are aligned. The schedules tweaked. The daughter and grandson are coming home for a few days. A precious few hours.
There’s a catch to it, of course. Children are an endless string of catches, and knots, and fuzzy shredded ends of string. Even adult children. Who have borne children of their own into your midst.
The catch is I have to go fetch her. From PA, no less. Which is a fairish sort of drive when you’re living in the backwater. Load ‘em up and drive back south. And when the visit is over, Ally gets to reverse the procedure (because I am fair about sharing the load, don’t you see) and drop them off.
This will be the second time this has been done. Last time I drove the return leg. At night. Very late at night, in fact. There was a blur of interstate 95 at 3 am with no coffee that just about did me in, because I am not so muchly a night-owl and treasure things like a large bed, particularly at 3 am.
But it shall be done. I’ll roll up 95 through DC and that other burg to the east (Pam and Batt! 695 and 795 at midnight, send up a flare!), then on up some pike to the little town on the PA border where pretzels are made.
For them.
He will be bigger and she wiser. There will be a grandma at the end of a 12 hour driving day with a house so clean, and a tree stuffed with belated Christmas things.
There will be pictures. New Years pictures for a new year with a little old man and the momma who loves him. There is a rightness about such things.
Adirondack love seat. Plain sawn white oak 7/8″ thick, assembled with coated screws which were countersunk and plugged. Wood finished with Flood CWF Clear exterior (U/V inhibitor) which is a translucent oil base finish. Seat slats are 1/2″ x 2″ Corian Bone White, secured to legs with stainless steel screws in countersunk holes. Labor time 10 hours, a lot of which involved the undulating back issue.
It’s heavy. This ain’t your Home Despot pine special. And we brought it into the house so the slow drying finish would speed up just a bit.
The Corian was left over from an install – window sills. I guarantee you if I hadn’t packratted the scraps this unit would have had white oak seat slats. I’m not going out and buying a sheet of Corian just ’cause, you know?
Next up: 2 bar stools made the same way, or pretty close. It’s tough to get the legs to work on a bar stool when you’re using an Adirondack design. Arms and backs and legs make the thing what it is, and I don’t want to lose the arms and back look. And I’ve still got some Corian left over.
This is suppose to be an outside unit, and I’m sure it will be eventually. But Ally swung it around in front of the fireplace and it shows no sign of going anywhere.
Matter of fact, I don’t think she wants it to. Must be a Christmas thing.
She sat across the dining room table and tried to get me to focus. Which, after another 9 hours of work and 135 miles of driving to get there, was a hard ol’ thing for me.
“Listen. I don’t want a lot this Christmas, see? No clothes, nothing that needs a trip to the store afterwards to get it running, no jewelry. I really would like one thing, just the one.”
“No jewelry? You don’t want gold or bracelets or . . .”
“What I’d really like for you to do is to make me something.”
“. . . a nice pendant or a ring or . . .”
“And I know you can make it, you’ve done it often enough.”
“. . . maybe some earrings. You like earrings, right?”
She paused, small smile and brown eyes dancing with some sort of long ago learned patience with children and a husband prone to ramble on. It is the patience of the mother and wife and it takes years of tending, my friends.
“Nope. No jewelry. I’d really love to have something to sit on, for out on the back deck. For nights when we light a fire in the little fire pit and sit out there and watch the moon. Something big enough for the both of us.” She leaned forward for emphasis. “An Adirondack love seat. That’s what I want.”
It was the end of the work day but the mind is not easily shut off. I calculate wood and wood products all day long. The cutlist for such a chair ran through my mind, sorted itself into board feet and waste factors and ‘What I didn’t have on hand in the shop Already’ lists in nanoseconds. It’s what I do, and I’ve had entirely too much practice at doing it. Even after a long work day and a tiresome drive. Not to mention three Shiner Bocks and their longneck goodness.
Adirondack love seat. For watching the moon.
I shifted. I coughed. “No jewelry? ‘Cause really, I don’t mind going by that nice jewelry store with the cute chicas in there workin’ on commission, on Christmas Eve, honest I don’t. They’re always so glad to see me, too.” Ally gazed at me, chin in hand, impassively waiting out the end of the oft-told tale. “Remember the year I went in there on Christmas Eve and told the nice lady just to out-do what she did last year and I’d be back in an hour to pick it up? Remember? And she did it too, by golly.”
The nice lady truly was nice, and she apparently had tipped off her employees, because I embrace the idea of walking into a store once a year with large amounts of cash or a bloated credit card and having my way with them. “Look for the carpenter looking fellow who wants to be outta here in less than five minutes. He drops two grand and wants to be smiled at a lot. Been coming in here for years, every Christmas Eve like clockwork. Wife and two daughters. All you gotta do is pick out three things they don’t already have. Sure makes my weekly quota, I can tell you that. Maybe my monthly quota!”
I look upon it as a holiday tradition, and care not the commerce behind it all. Some things are best tagged with a spirit of doing the same thing you always have, that always works, that makes the girls smile and swoon just a bit, come Christmas morning.
Adirondack love seat. For watching the moon. And tending the fire pit.
“That’s all you want, an old chair? No jewelry?”
“No jewelry, love. You can make a chair, right?”
Of course. She knew that. I’d run off batches of chairs over the years. Kept some, gave away more. Cypress and cedar and redwood and pine. I once made 50 in one run for a commercial marina and got sick of the sight of them. I can make a chair.
“That’s what you want?”
“Honest, it is.” And here she leaned forward and gave me the look. It’s a dreamy sort of look that invariably slithers down the back of my eyes until it snatches deliciously at my very soul, tugging and caressing.
“Can you make it for me?” And a smile. “I’ll make you fried chicken tonight, too.”
Well, then. Nothing more to consider, right?
Because my wife is Southern born and bred. And there is no such thing as anything better than her fried chicken. Of all the absolutes in life, this is the one unshakable truth. It is a pure and blissful thing, is Ally’s chicken.
~~~~~
We were sitting in the big rig work truck, Tommy and I, awaiting the delivery of something to install. It was a rushed something, it happens every year about this time. A rush to finish construction jobs by the end of the year means everyone and everything gets rushed right along with it.
“So that’s what she wants for her Christmas present, a chair? You’re kiddin’ me, right?”
“Not just a chair, a love seat. Like two chairs. That’s twice the work, in a way. Plus, I’m thinkin’ of making it out of white oak. Go the whole nine yards so to speak.”
Tommy was incredulous. “Man, you’re one lucky bastard. You got a big shop and all those tools and all that skill and your wife wants you to just make her a chair. For Christmas. How do I sign up for that gig? You got off so cheap, ‘bro.”
“Wait a second. I gotta buy the lumber, which isn’t cheap by any means. Haul it all the way to the backwater and set up all the stuff and by the way, I need more kerosene to heat the damn shop. Here it is Friday, the Friday before Christmas. I got lots to do, and it surely ain’t gonna be cheap.”
“How long you known about this, Jim?”
I puffed, and grinned. “Couple weeks, I reckon.”
Tommy hooted. “Man you’re one procrastinatin’ dude, aren’t you? But you’re still lucky. My girlfriend, all she wants is jewelry and clothes. Gonna cost me a fortune, she is.”
I looked at him a tad mournfully. “Jewelry, huh?”
“Yep. And trust me, she knows the good stuff, too. Got an eye for that sort of thing. You wouldn’t believe it, I have to go to an honest-to-God jewelry store every year.”
“Oh I would, Tommy. I really, sho’-nuff would.”
He was silent for a while, pondering the grey day with no delivery truck in sight, a big man with a contented life much like my own. The hurry of the season didn’t seem to touch my good helper very much. Of course, as helpers go, he’s a long ways towards being a journeyman carpenter in his own right.
“So when you gonna get the white oak, anyway?”
Good thought. Especially since it was Friday morning, and the lumber yard would be closed for the weekend and the holiday beyond.
“Right now. Watch this, miracle of technology and all that.” I produced a cell phone and dialed a number from memory that I hadn’t dialed in two years. To talk to a man I hadn’t seen in an equal amount of time. But for things like this, there are traditions, and ways. Not unlike the Nice Jewelry Store Lady ways. And in a community of those who work with wood, there aren’t many who’ve been doing so for thirty years or more.
“That you, Chris? Jim here. ‘Bout the same, hoss. Listen. 4/4 white oak, straight lined and skip planed, about a hundred board feet. Random lengths, shorts are okay. Mmm-hmm. Right. Okay, my brother. See you.” And I hung up the phone.
Tommy was staring. “Did you just call who I think you just called? The old place downtown by the tracks?”
“That’s the one. Probably the only one in town with white oak, lad.”
“And when can you get it?”
“Couple hours, he says.”
Tommy was bug-eyed by now, and shaking his head. “Last time I called them they wouldn’t even talk to me. Had to go in there with a fistful of cash and he about ran me outta there!”
“Yeh. They’ve been known to do that. Cantankerous bunch, for sure.”
“Holy smokes and they’re gonna mill this out for you to boot?”
“Rough mill, yes. I get to do the fine stuff myself.”
Tommy was still shaking his head in wonder. “Man, you are one lucky . . .”
I grinned the grin of the smug, the ancient, the Grinchy and wise. But he was right. I am one lucky bastard, somedays. Particularly with three and a half shopping days to go.
~~~~~
And with no further preamble, I find myself this morning at a stage of sorts. A stage where there is mess in the Shop, tools laid out as if for surgery, and a matter of hours to go.
There is a seat yet to be made, to go with the rest of it. And a finish, a protector from the rain of the backwater. Some sanding to do. Some tweaking and a great deal of standing alone in a Shop alongside the house, musing about a woman who can be made to smile on Christmas morning with little more than the twirling of my two hands upon a pile of oak.
There is no jewelry for Ally this year.
But I am rich with fable and sawdust, and the brown eyes that look at me that way. And a moon to watch, and a fire to tend.
It is more than enough.
