Pandemic Chairs
I spent most of our lockdown trying not to think about food, and mostly, not being successful at not thinking about food. I also spent a lot of time cooking and eating. Meals provide such a tangible beginning, middle, and end to the day, with snacks as punctuation.
My hubby, on the other hand, declared early on that he wanted something positive to come out of the long isolation (besides the continuation of our marriage, obviously). So he built some chairs.
And by ‘building chairs’ I mean he made the design based on a Mission chair that we like, milled the wood, and built the chairs from the bottom up. It wasn’t easy to find online places that would deliver all the wood doweling, oil, and wax that he needed, and getting the foam and material for cushions, but sourcing stuff was my tiny contribution. It gave me a break from the obsessive Twitter and news sessions, and from all the food thinking.
The wood for the chairs came from the neighboring farm, where a couple of trees had been cut down some 50 years ago, roughly milled into slabs 6" deep, and around 4' long x 2' wide. Looking like Damian Hirst sculptures but without the horror, these sliced nut and elm trunks, still with bark, had been ageing in a dry barn all that time. I’d seen the neighbor taking them out a couple of years ago, getting ready to cut them up for firewood, and back then I ran out and stopped him. For a total of around $200, we ended up buying two whole trees worth of wood and splitting it between four friends. We were all giddy with delight; our neighbor made it clear he thought we were suckers.
Some of the other slabs are being used as rough garden steps, an easy (okay, lazy) implementation. Two have been made into long coffee tables by a friend, who kept them intact, sanded and polished them to perfection, and put simple iron legs on them. Very midcentury modern.
We don’t have any place in the house that can accommodate tables that large, and our old armchairs were scratched into oblivion by a number of cats who are all now deceased. So the old trees were destined for armchairs.
The cushions arrived yesterday, and the Pandemic Chairs are complete. In a time of such uncertainty and flux, there’s something about using the aged wood of local trees, milled by a neighbor’s father (who is also long since gone), then milled again in our own garden, into chairs that face one another in front of the wood stove. It’s satisfying, in an old house like ours that’s seen generations of inhabitants come and go, to sense the constancy of existence even in the face of dramatic change. It’s a melding of continuity and of transformation. A bit of positivity during these strange times.
