Chestnut

We are collectors. Perhaps it’s the fact that we have more space; perhaps acquisitiveness is part of our personal DNA.  Or maybe we are just the slightest bit deranged about having things.  

Whatever the reason, in spite of the fact that the LAST thing we need is more stuff, we went to a craft fair on Friday and an antiques show on Saturday. Usually, JC and I part ways at these things, as our collections follow different paths. He looks for books and maps and Noah’s arks. I scan for cut glass and wooden ware.  Craft fairs are sometimes disappointing (no books, no glass) but are

fun to browse through. One never knows what people will bring to sell. (I once found a magnificent cathedral window quilt at a ridiculously low price at an antiquarian book sale… it pays to look, and to ask.)

In any case, I was looking for the wood craftsmen: the turned bowls, the handmade boxes, the scoops and ladles, the cutting boards—but I found a furniture maker. 

Now, I subscribe to the Jonathan Gash/ Lovejoy school of treasure. In Gash’s series of mystery novels, his hero, Lovejoy, is a divvy, which means that he has a unique gift. He can distinguish true antiques from reproductions or outright fakes, simply by his reaction to the object. The explanation he gives is that a true craftsman invests enough of himself in his work that the love of the maker lingers with his creation through the years, and is compounded by the love of its various caretakers. It is this emotional content that rings in his head and heart, and allows him to distinguish genuine from fake.

Wood strikes that kind of chord in me. Maybe it IS because of all the loving work that goes into making something from wood. Or maybe it’s just the texture and the grain, or the color or the polished surface. It speaks to me somehow.  I have a raft of bowls and vases and trays murmuring on my shelves at home. It is hard for me to resist a beautiful piece of wood.

And so, I stopped short in front of a desk.

Caramel-colored, simple in style; a couple drawers, a couple pigeonholes; beautiful grain, marked with tiny random holes.  When the chestnut blight killed the trees long ago, I was told, they were cut down and the wood was used as building material. This desk was wormy chestnut, the maker informed me, the piece built from chestnut boards he’d taken from old buildings and restored to life as furniture. The wood from the American chestnut tree has all but disappeared, except for this kind of reclamation.  Life, death, a period of structural limbo—and finally, a resurrection from the dead.  Literary connections popped into my head—“Under the spreading chestnut tree, the village smithy stands…”  “April in Paris; chestnuts in blossom..”  Literature. Music. A piece of American history. A parable of hope. What better inspiration could a writer ask?

I bought the desk.  It sits by my window with my notebooks and pens—a sort of tree heaven for the chestnut, I like to think, after all its travail—transformed by skill and love from forgotten wood to genuine art; speaking still, loud and clear--in a voice that perhaps only I can hear.