shavings and dust

t here is a little, old house on Wig Hill Road. You get there by turning left off of South Wig Hill Road in rural Connecticut. No, really.

It is a kind of house that I am familiar with from rural North Carolina. The kind of house that was built while land was being cleared. Set up sturdily but hastily, a need for shelter taking precedence over straight lines or square corners. Puts me in mind of Roy Underhill (I think, or it could be Eric Sloane. In fact, I think it is Eric Sloane. The proprietor of Waypoints is such a stickler for attributing correctly, I want to make sure that I oblige. Where was I? I just got lost in this parenthetical statement.)

Oh. Right. Eric Sloane: "For why should a corner be absolutely square, if the beam does not wish it? Why should the beam be planed absolutely flat if the need is not present?"

Down on the mountains of the Old North State, these cabins were built by farmers who were clearing land by hand in the mountains as a place to live until they could build a nicer house. Low ceilings, small rooms, exposed hand-hewn beams. The kind of place that a real estate agent would say was "full of charm." I think of them as the result of a very direct need for shelter and warmth and protection from the elements.

I am working in this little house. I know nothing of the history of it except what I can see with my own eyes and feel with my hands. It has not had an easy life or been well cared for, that much is instantly clear. Structure was removed long ago that was vital, and that has had to be replaced (with beams from Brooklyn, Connecticut, it turns out. Old Rudy is well known over here). Repairs have been made in impromptu and temporary ways over the years. When the current owners bought the house, the first contractor told them that they should number all the pieces, take it apart, and rebuild it from the ground up.

They chose not to.

Think what you may about that choice, it put into place a string of events that led to me standing in this little, very old house yesterday, going over a list of tasks. So I am glad that things worked out this way. Here are post and beam joints that have held for a hundred years, with "trunnels," which are wooden pegs, holding them in place. Still. The frame may be sagging, the roof may be trying to cave in, but those joints are still holding, by gum. Those mortices and tennons and pegs that were laid out and cut by hand are maybe all that are keeping this old shack from collapsing completely.

I am aware that my blog posts here are repetitive. "Old stuff is great, new stuff is crap. Blah blah blah." But every time I stand in front of, or in this case, inside of an example of the work of hands and heart and mind that are so strong and so well placed so many years later, I can not help myself.

This is beauty, you know? The beauty of a Thing Well Made. It is the beauty that I feel hauling on a line on a vessel that was built in 1885 and is still sailing. It is the beauty that I get to feel when I use a hand saw that belonged to my great great grandfather. It is a different beauty from the beauty of my niece, or of a song wonderfully rendered, or of a sunset in the Appalachians, but it is a beauty that really grabs me, and that I love to feel and to smell and to touch and to taste.

For this week, I get to work on and in and with this little, old house. More posts as work goes forward.