Finished Pieces Hanging on the Loom

The Weaver’s Bench

When I was a child I would answer the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” by declaring that I dreamed of being an artist. I wasn’t planning on being a policeman or a fireman or doctor; I wanted to grow up to be an artist. I had heard none of my contemporaries say that, so it made me a little nervous to proclaim, but it also set me apart.

As I grew, I also kept that dream of creativity. However, the goal kept running into the twin obstacles of a lack of talent and unwillingness to practice. Music and drawing both were disappointments, as my fingers couldn’t manage what my mind intended. I thought of being a chef, an artist with food, but that would have been a disaster due to my weakness at organization -- the main dish would have been ready before the vegetables were even started.

Instead of art, I have found a craft. It is weaving. Twenty-eight years ago Nancy found a weaver willing to give me a crash course, so for Christmas of that year her present sent me into temporary apprenticeship to Marietta Crider of Mauzy for a few hours each week. I learned some of the techniques of matching warp and weft, of maintaining a good selvedge, of threading the loom and tying knots. At some point of imagined wealth in those early years of our marriage I purchased a large floor loom and ever since, when I’ve been able to steal an hour away from all the duties of adulthood, I’ve sat at the loom and created.

I enjoy working with textiles, various materials from around the world. The last creation I did included soy thread and bamboo in the warp and wool from the Shetland Islands and Tunisia in the weft. The two completed pieces were a table runner for my cousin Nora who has sheltered Nancy during the start of her work experience in Washington, D.C. and a scarf for Cami, a friend from Romania who began married life last week. It took nearly six months to finish these two pieces, working a stolen hour at a time, and that’s not counting the chore of warping the loom.

Occasionally, I will donate a piece to a charity auction, but I don’t sell my output anymore. The pleasure for me is in the creation and the challenge of matching pattern to finished product – turning what is in the mind’s eye into a piece that can be worn, or displayed. Like my attempts at drawing and painting, what is in the mind’s eye and the finished product are often very different, but in this craft, what turns out is usually quite serviceable. Those few that aren’t sit in the extra bedroom here at the house.

A Winter's Morning

Wood Choppers Ball

It is chilly this evening. The Shenandoah Valley has had snow flurries off and on all day. The wood stove is fired up and the temperature inside is cozy, while outside it is a damp thirty-three degrees f.

It is a cliché to say wood is a fuel that heats you twice – once when you burn it, and previously when you cut it. In my case, it heats three times, the third being when I split it. The wood that lies piled in three rows outside the yard is the culmination of summer and fall work cutting wind fallen trees and November and December splitting. I enjoy the work, taken in small dozes. I especially enjoy hefting the splitting mall above my head and with a grunt and groan, whacking the pieces that are too wide for the wood stove. There is a satisfaction for an old man to be able to hoist the mall and split the wood with a crisp shommp as the edge of the mall cleaves into grain of the wood. The pride swells when a log splits with a single smash.

We don’t heat primarily with wood, but use it as a backup to the propane/hot water fired furnace. Most evenings the main heat is off and the wood stove cranking away, but the fire will go out during the night and the furnace is timed to kick in for the morning warm up. If our schedules take us out of the house during the evenings, we’ll let the furnace do all the work. I can’t say that wood burning is money saving when calculating the expense of gas, oil and sharpened blades for the chainsaw, versus the cost of running propane to the water heater that would be heating the hot water anyway. I should do a cost analysis to see if I’m really saving any money.

But money is not the real reason we burn wood. Our wood stove has a glass front so I can turn out the lights and watch the fire dance as it consumes the logs. As the trees that provide the logs have been blown down in the wind, it is a way to maintain the looks and function of the farm. Robert Frost wrote a poem about an old woodpile found on a walk in his woods – the phrase that sticks in my mind is “the slow burning of decay”. I do leave a few standing dead trees on our property for the benefit of the woodpeckers, but if the trees that have been knocked over by the wind are going to burn slowly anyway, I’ll burn them fast and be warm thrice over.

Conversing Angels

It has been a long time since my last blog entry and I doubt that many folks bother to check for new material any more. The best of intentions are often laid aside when inspiration cannot overcome inertia.

Last week Nancy and I journeyed to Carlisle, Pennsylvania for the memorial service of my Aunt Elinor. This was the aunt whom we visited a year ago December on her 100th birthday. She passed away at the age of 101 on January 19th, 2008. Her five children and many other family members were present for the service, held in the old Episcopal church on the town square of Carlisle.

Many kind and appropriate words were said, particularly two epistles from her Granddaughters. I thought that I’d add here a few of my own thoughts.

A long time ago I heard a wise man explain the difference between reputation and character. Reputation, he said, was what people say of you during your eulogy. Character is what the angels say of you in heaven. Knowing my dear Aunt Elinor, I suspect that over the past two weeks the angels have had much to discuss.

Carlisle was a refuge to me as a child. It was a summer home and an escape provided by my Aunt and Uncle Joe. Granddad and I would shelter there – I for a few weeks, he for a few months. He always had a tenuous relationship with his oldest daughter, while I tried my best to stay neutral.

Aunt Elinor’s grandmother was named Georgiana, a person I never met, but much revered in the Cooke family of the generation ahead of me. I have a niece, Georgiana Hulings Robertson, named in honor of the forbearer. As a symbol of the symmetry, the circle of live, on the very day that Aunt Elinor died, January 19, 2008, Georgiana gave birth to her first child, a daughter with the lovely name of Grace Carol.

Perhaps it would take a mathematician to figure out the percent age of genes and DNA that Grace and her great, great grandaunt share, but I hope that it is a fair portion of Elinor’s determination, her steadfastness, her curiosity and her intelligence. Should it be so, then some years in the future, I suggest that the angels will have another lively dialogue when it comes time to admit Grace.