Suburban Wild

I finished the writing table I’ve been building my daughter. So here it is, white oak with a boiled linseed oil and paste wax finish. The top is 30 inches by 16 inches, and it’s 26 inches high, about four inches shorter than a normal table.

This was a good project to get me back into woodworking, nothing too complicated. I did find, interestingly, that my memory of how I’d built the cherry side tables and coffee table in my living room was not quite accurate. I immediately set to cutting mortises with my mortising chisels, then realized that I had only done this once or twice — because I hadn’t owned the mortising chisels when I built the “good” tables. I’m not sure exactly how I did cut those mortises. They came out well and the joints are fine, but I need more practice.

I found I like working with white oak. I also used card scrapers for the first time to smooth the surface, instead of sandpaper, after the last pass with the smoothing plane. I actually found I got a smoother finish with the scraper than with 220-grit sandpaper — I’m guessing because the scraper cuts the grain instead of mashing it. I finished up with 320-grit sandpaper and then applied two coats of boiled linseed oil, which is enough protection for a writing table, I think. The Monkey helped me wax it before we brought it inside.

The lower-than-normal table posed one practical problem: finding a chair. I’d thought to buy a wooden chair from a used furniture store and cut down the legs, but then in the Staples insert in last week’s Sunday newspaper there was an adjustable-height “task chair” for $9.99 after rebates. Pink fabric with multicolored flowers. Perfect. It’s an odd match for my oaken table made with hand tools and finished with materials available in the eighteenth century, but it works. And it seems to make the kid happy; she’s been coloring and putting together puzzles and generally looking for excuses to sit at her table and do something. So, mission accomplished.

More photos:

And here it is in use:

One evening a few weeks ago I filled the front-yard birdfeeder, which had sat empty several days while I didn’t quite get around to fixing it. I put the feed scoop away in the shed, and by the time I had walked the hundred yards there and back to the front porch, a female cardinal had found the fresh seed. After eating a few morsels she sat and chirped — crowing over her prize? But the chirping was short and came at intervals, and in half a minute another cardinal arrived, and the first flew off into a bush at the side of the house. This second cardinal was a juvenile, its feathers gray but tinged with red and a bit rough as they are when they molt their first summer, halfway from fledgling camoflauge to male plumage. While he ate, the first bird, perched in the bush a few yards from me, continued her rhythmic chirping another minute before she flew into the woods. Then a second juvenile male, who had been perched near the feeder, took his turn, and the first flew away.

There is so much chaos and competition at the birdfeeder that it took me a few minutes to recognize what was going on. The first bird was the mother, chirping to alert her fledged but still not-quite independent boys that the feeder had been filled — and then continuing the alarm to remind them to get to the safety of the woods when they were finished eating. Time for dinner, finish your homework, and don’t forget to buckle up. I’m not sure I would have expected cardinals to parent that actively for that long, but then I’m not sure I’d thought about it. The orderly taking of turns, too, surprised me — if they were going to cooperate, there are two sides to the feeder; why not each one take a side? Is sibling rivalry a dry run for competition over mates and territory?

While I was contemplating all this, a neighbor started shooting off his gun, and that was the end of Happy Front Yard Nature Time. But consider the silver lining: if my hominid neighbors were more impressive, I might not feel the need to make the yard a wildlife habitat. It’s all in how you look at things.

It has for several years been a source of mild frustration to me that I cannot find a reliable recipe for preserves. I have all kinds of recipes for chutneys and conserves and marmalades, and for jams with honey and low-sugar jellies and for special preserves made from this or that sort of (where I live) unattainable stone fruit. What I want is simply strawberry preserves, peach preserves, blackberry preserves, and there, so far as I can tell, are no well-tested recipes to be had in books.

For basic jams and jellies, of course, the folded sheet in the box of pectin gives me instructions, but the point of preserves is not to use boxed pectin. Preserves is fruit with just enough sugar to literally preserve it, and perhaps a touch of fresh lemon juice if even that much sugar seems too sweet; it is stirred and tended while it cooks down; it is soft on the spoon and in the mouth, not molded like a school-lunch dessert. To make true preserves is to capture the essence of fresh summer fruit and hoard it away in a cupboard for the horrible soggy February morning when you simply cannot face another day of winter, and you open it up and spoon dollops onto buttered toast and feel that perhaps you can live another day. read more…

It’s taken me a year of fits and starts, of hemming and hawing and sharpening and organizing, but I’ve finally managed to get into a real woodworking project: a child-sized writing table.

Since we realized — or “decided,” if I want to claim more agency in the matter — that we would be living in our present small house until, at least, the Monkey was grown and off to college, we’ve thought that we would one day loft her bed to give her more space for a desk. The Monkey is my daughter, and though she is now nearly six and I am no longer permitted officially to call her “the Monkey,” it’s the only pseudonym I have, and it fits as well as it ever has — by which you might guess, as we’ve recently accepted, that lofting her bed is going to remain a dangerous proposition for some years to come. She is… energetic. And impulsive. For the latter I have to claim some responsibility, but I have no idea where she gets her energy. Solar power, maybe. In any case, lofting her bed would present, as we tell her about so many things, a “safety issue.”

If we can’t loft her bed, she doesn’t really have room for a desk. And not having a desk of her own will, after a certain point soon to come, make homeschool difficult. The kitchen table is fine for some things, but we all need our own space.

After we rearranged her room last week, I noted that there was space enough at the foot of her bed for a small writing table. Not a full-sized desk, but a table big enough for a book, pad of paper, and pencil, or for a box of crayons and some paper.

Then I remembered the white oak I’d bought to build her a toddler bed, back in the fall of 2004. I got as far as squaring the legs and paneling up the headboard and footboard before I had to put the project aside for a few months, and by the time I got back to it, I’d realized that she was growing so fast that she’d be out of the toddler bed within another year. I tend toward pigheadedness, but I have my limits. The next summer we headed to Pier One Kids, and the white oak gathered dust in my workshop.

It turns out — almost magically — that the legs are just the right height for a writing table that will serve her for a few years, and that the headboard panel makes a tabletop just big enough for the writing surface she needs. Small but serviceable, and the hardest labor is already done. After some trimming and planing I set to making the apron, and tonight I finished the tenons. I sharpened my 12mm Iyoroi mortising chisel, and tomorrow, maybe, I’ll start cutting the mortises.

It’s been years now since I built a piece of “fine” furniture, and I was honestly a bit afraid that I’d have forgotten the methods, the procedures, the little tricks that make work with hand tools — well, work. But this seems to be one of those skills that’s like riding a bicycle. I have to spend a little extra time thinking through each step, but the kinesthetic memory brings it all back. It’s probably best that I’m starting with something simple — I’m not even giving it a drawer; I want to keep the apron fairly narrow to leave room for her knees. But it’s good to be back in the shop. There is a satisfaction in the smooth surface and sharp corners of a fresh-planed board that I never seem to find elsewhere.

One of the main reasons we live where we do is the woods. Our property is two lots, joined together because county ordinances passed after the land was first subdivided require an acre for a septic system. The second lot is entirely wooded, and we left it completely alone the first several years we lived here — a buffer between us and our neighbors, nothing more. In the fall of 2007 my wife decided to start cutting a nature trail through the woods for our daughter, who was then four. After about 100 yards I took over and did most of the rest of the work. The trail starts just off our driveway and makes a big loop through the woods.

About the time we were starting the project, a sparrow flew into the window of our car just as I opened the door to get in. It fell dead to the ground, its neck broken by the impact. My daughter, who was sitting inside the car, was terribly upset, and she helped me bury the bird in the woods by the start of the trail. In the bird’s honor she thought the trail should be named Sparrow Trail, and the sign made it official.

In the photo you can see, through the trees, the road, which is about twenty feet from the start of the trail. Nowhere on our property is more than a literal stone’s throw from the border, but once you are down onto the trail, the neighbors feel much farther away.

Before the Four on the Fourth this morning I watched a boy, I guessed not yet two, running top speed up and down the sidewalk, a Superman cape fluttering behind him.

“That has to help,” I said to his mother.

She half-turned, keeping a wary eye on the boy.

“It has to improve your time in a race if you’re Superman.”

“Well, that’s what we’re hoping… some of that will rub off.”

As it became clear that Superman had no intention of returning on his own, she headed after him, and I wandered back to the coffee table. Later I saw her strapping him into a baby jogger, an affront that caused young Superman to shriek at the top of his lungs. Superman does not ride! Superman wants to run! Superman wants to fly!

I thought, ok: I’m trying to do something I haven’t done before, to run a time I’ve not even really toyed with in the past but that I’ve decided I’m capable of running. The Runner’s World training calculator says that I can do it — that I can run faster than that, even, implying that I’m a big sissy if I don’t. It is bad enough when high school gym teachers suggest that you might be a sissy; far worse when a computer does it. In any case, I was about to try to do it.

Then I saw Superman shrieking in his Graco prison and I thought, what would he do? He would run like hell and think it was the BEST THING EVER. So I decided to run for Superman. I decided that yes, it would hurt, and it was going to be the best thing ever.

And I did, and it was.

What became of Superman and his mother, I don’t know. I couldn’t stay for the kids’ races, but I hope he did, and that he PR’d the 50 meters. But then every race is a PR when you’re Superman.

Found this growing on a loblolly pine stump yesterday:

In the morning it was brighter, sort of a cross between tennis-ball yellow and yellow ochre, and smoother in texture. By late afternoon, when I got around to borrowing my wife’s camera with the good macro lens, it was spongier and less obnoxiously colored. As dry as it’s been lately this hasn’t so far been a good summer for fungus, but this is a new one on me.

Round about Earth Day we certified our backyard and woods a wildlife habitat with the National Wildlife Federation. The certification is really just a checklist: You check off that your property provides food, water, and cover for wildlife as well as places for animals to raise their young, and that your garden/yard is “green,” give the NWF a little money, and they send you a certificate. For a little more money you get the sign, above. As you can see, the presence of junk in your yard does not disqualify you.

We have about three-quarters of an acre of woods on our property, which, except for cutting a small trail so that we can enjoy them, we’ve left alone, so we have habitat almost by default. The difficult part, I suppose, is that we’ve left it alone, including the part in the middle that gets swampy in spring and breeds mosquitoes, but also the toads that eat them. There are dead trees where woodpeckers and nuthatches nest, and sugarberry and buckthorn trees to provide berries.

But we also minimize lawn space, garden organically, and supplement the natural space with birdfeeders, nestboxes, and a birdbath. We’re trying slowly to replace the landscaping with native perennials. So you could do this on a very small scale, in an urban neighborhood, with no land at all that could be called “natural.” The idea is simply to make your property a home for as many sorts of creatures as possible — to live within nature rather than carving your home out of it — which doesn’t seem too much to ask.