Worn and Perfect

Photo courtesy Flickr

I love being around artifacts that improve with age. When I wore jeans, there was a span between being broken in and broken down that felt just right. An acquaintance once served meal a meal with a silver fork almost as malleable as an aluminum pie plate: the flatware had been in her family for generations, and eating with that fork left me grateful for what small command I have of fine motor skills.

For forty-five dollars at a yard sale, I picked up two hundred square feet of hand-knotted tribal camel hair rug woven in a traditional Afghani pattern: the central part of the rug was beginning to show the warp. It’s not uncommon even now to find fine brass reading lamps from the early twentieth century in thrift shops.

Uncle Landon bought an old chair. The grain on the parts that show has raised slightly with two hundred years’ changes in temperature and humidity. After he seated me on the chair, Uncle Landon said he’d looked at it for several years before realizing it was Hepplewhite. My back and bootie just love that chair.

Another uncle mushed out from Port Angeles to visit the ancestral homestead, now in other hands. He brought me two shingles from the smokehouse, which had collapsed. They’re a yard long, split from six-hundred year old cedar from virgin rain forest, and are patterned on one side with smoke and on the other with the subtle erosion of a hundred fifty years of clean rain. I think they’re the most interesting things to look at in the house, because nothing of them is predictable or man-made.

One of the homesteaders who settled in the area that became Olympic National Park left his hatchet to my grandfather. I had a chance to handle the tool as a child when I ran across it and the man’s will in my grandparents’ attic. The lifetime inventory of a Yale graduate who guided Teddy Roosevelt through clear cuts and virgin timber and convinced him to establish the park was listed on one typed page. A possession is valued differently when it stands between one and hypothermia, and back-up is a fifteen mile hike away. The hatchet looked like a champion show dog of advanced years. The handle was built up of patterned layers of different kinds of wood, and the head was razor sharp, modified by years of honing into a subtle variant of the original casting. It was made by a company whose name is still familiar, but it came from another world.

Shiny and perfect is just right for medical gear and laptops, but life is richer when you learn to appreciate the effects of time and respectful use.

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