CHAIRSA time-darkened chair of oak, it stood among other chairs of other kinds, empty of all but time and craft, in a warehouse for antiques; a sign said the chair had been made in England a couple of hundred years ago. It was a spoked, round-back chair with arms, a practical chair, its seat a single slab of wood, selected with care that the beautiful grain would be polished to this very sheen by centuries of backsides, and it looked in the physical language inviting so I sat in it.
The chair had been made for the body the way only a lifelong maker of chairs for folks he will see every day for the rest of his life makes a chair. It wasn't a quick production line assembly for a never-known stranger somewhere else in the world; it was the hand-fashioned essence of chair, that the maker himself had been fashioning, by way of his family, for three or four hundred years or even more, until his fingers, hands and heart knew vastly more than just how to make chairs-- the feeling was born into the hands by then, and one man could conjure an entire chair, for the entire body, out of wood with just fire and iron, make it sing with function.
I could feel that song in my self when I leaned my back upon the back of the chair and lay my arms upon its arms, my hands coming to rest where hands had been anticipated with simple grace, the maker saying to me thus eloquently over centuries that he had known how and where my elbows and hands would come to rest, how they would want to rest and how to welcome them-- where hands had in fact been coming to rest for centuries-- are we not one, after all, for here was a chair that was made for the one we each are: not a market unit but a person, with whom a chair should be a private conversation.
It was a chair made to last beyond a life, like a poem or a song, the craft of it to be remembered, another form of the name of the maker, of himself and the grace of his hands to be passed on and spoken of, sung of in wood, taken good comfort in, and I realized I had in all my years on earth never been so well understood by a chair; no chair had ever told me of these things. Every chair I'd ever sat in had been mute, built for a phantom, a non-existent entity, an average consumer. Few go this far to make chairs any more; and if they do, the result is a remarkable not to say purely aesthetic artifact unique to its time and form, costing too much to be actually sat in, more design than chair and so not comfortable to the sitter, who feels less valuable than what he sits in, as though there were truth in a throne.
In my time I have sat in many chairs, that made me feel all sorts of ways-- from the tubular kind with the plastic caps on the leg-ends that chaired the 1950's to bags of styrofoam beads to leather/steel trapezoids on legs to straight-back chairs, bentwood chairs, easy chairs, reclining chairs, and on and on, and this was the first chair that had ever, how shall I say it, welcomed me, personally. The back curled round and the arms curled round and I was really
in the chair, felt both embraced and rooted as I sat there, rooted like an ancient tree; there was no postural insistence from the chair, no disquieting tipsiness, no jittery ricketyness, no gangly angularity, no shoddy looseness, no shivery tubularity, no artistic misfitting, but solidity: simple, rooted, oaktree solidity, after 200 years of use!!!
What today is made like that? What today like that is made by a man who, like his father and grandfather and further back, has fashioned his very life into comfort for people he knows and will never know, from whom he seeks respect and appreciation, even centuries hence? Sitting in the chair I could feel in my heart as in my body every measure of the distance we have come from all the things that in their ways once filled life quietly and elegantly to the brim, how things in themselves used to tell us of one another, and show in their use the care that resided in what we crafted, how wholeheartedly we gave of our lives in our creations.
This was a chair that had been made by transforming the beauty of trees through the beauty of hands into the beauty of chairs. How far from there we are, on the chairs that bear us now, when we never set eyes on or even sense who makes the chairs we use, and more and more likely it's not even a who but a series of whats, as the spirit of hands fades from the products around us until there isn't a caress in a carload, and we live unknown by our surroundings is what the chair said, with an eloquence increasingly lost to our time.
[Rewritten from the archives]
Well the grandees arrived yesterday afternoon and, having suffered one long child-year of deep snow deprivation, were unable to get out of the car without squealing and running straight to the snow mountains I'd made in front of the deck and climbing right up and down them over and over for immediate replenishment, in the fever of their delirium making snowballs to throw at anything at all until they came to the next level of their senses and ran en masse to the tool shed - filling their boots with snow at every step, but who cares about feet when there's food for the starving - to get any item at all that could hold snow, like shovels, trowels, buckets etc., then they fanned out into the garden and began to fill in holes and elevate hills and otherwise rearrange the snowscape to their frenzied liking when at 
some point I mentioned a nice big open snowy slope up in the forest where they might want to go and play, and with one voice of yes they flung their forgotten tools to the ground (where the tools still are, as I notice out the window on the garden) so we all walked upmountain into the forest - actually we adults walked and the kids ran - where we came to a nice clear slope of virgin snow and the three filled the forest with squeals at the sight, a sound 
most awesome yet somehow quite at home in the sylvan silence, as they ran up the hill arms waving, scarves flying, boots falling off, the hill would be perfect for tobogganning if we had a toboggan but they don't have toboggans in Japan so the snowcovered trio just used their bodies and ran up and slid, rolled, tumbled and galloomphed to the bottom then back up again, quickly exhausting the adults, who at last herded the snowsodden three back through the woods with their snowmelt mittens and icewater boots, I gave one my handwarmer to help her survive till we arrived back at the house with three little melting snowladies who right away gathered by the toasty woodstove and had some hot tea and opened their presents, all without the slightest bit of a fight it was great, we all sat around the low homemade wooden table in front of the stove and had homemade pizza before the kids all took turns wearing the moonmask. A typical first day of the snow cure.
