The Third Winter

By the third winter, the chair was almost recognizable as a chair. This was progress. The first winter had produced an object that my wife described, after a long pause, as "structural." The second winter yielded something you could sit on if you didn't mind leaning and had no particular attachment to your trousers. The third winter — this winter — I made a chair that looked like a chair, functioned as a chair, and only wobbled when you shifted your weight to the left, which I explained to my wife was a feature. "A feature," she said. "It encourages good posture." I took up woodworking because a magazine article said it was meditative. The article showed a man in a clean apron, standing in a workshop full of natural light, holding a hand plane with the serene expression of someone who has never hit his thumb with a mallet. I hit my thumb with a mallet on the first day. The meditation was immediate and profane. The workshop is our garage. There is no natural light. There is a fluorescent tube that flickers at a frequency my neighbour, who is an electrician, says is "probably fine." The floor is covered in shavings that I sweep up every Sunday and that reappear by Monday through what I can only assume is spontaneous generation. My tools are a mismatched collection acquired piecemeal from car boot sales, hardware shop clearances, and one memorable birthday when my wife got me a dovetail saw she'd seen recommended on YouTube. It is the best tool I own. I am not worthy of it. Using it feels like being handed the keys to a sports car when you've only just passed your test. The first thing I made was a chopping board. Everyone says start with a chopping board. It is flat. It is rectangular. You cannot get it wrong. I got it wrong. It was trapezoidal and slightly concave, like a roof tile. We used it anyway. Onions rolled gently toward the centre while you cut them, which my wife said was actually quite helpful. The second thing I made was a box. The joints didn't meet. The lid didn't close. My daughter, who was nine, said it looked like a house for a very small, very cold person. She put a plastic dinosaur in it and declared it the dinosaur's flat. The dinosaur has lived in the box for two years. I consider this my most successful piece. The chairs were ambition. I watched videos. I read books. I drew plans on graph paper, then abandoned the plans, then went back to them, then abandoned them again in favour of "feeling it out," which is what people who don't know what they're doing call not knowing what they're doing. The first chair had four legs of four different lengths. I compensated with felt pads of varying thickness, which worked until the cat pulled one off and the chair developed a lean so pronounced that sitting in it felt like being on a ship. The second chair was better. It was approximately level. The back was at an angle that a physiotherapist would probably not approve of but that I found acceptable after three beers, which is when I tested it. It lived in the garage for a month before I brought it inside, where it served as a plant stand. The third chair is in the kitchen. People sit on it. Not everyone, and not for long periods, but people sit on it and do not comment on its construction or ask if it's finished, which I count as a victory. My wife sat in it last week, reading. She didn't lean left. She didn't mention the wobble. She just sat and read for an hour, and when she got up she said, "That's actually comfortable," with the particular surprise of someone who has been following a project for three years and had, privately, given up hope. I am making a table now. It has four legs. Theoretically.