Nina MacLaughlin's Blog, page 24
February 24, 2015
Friends, readers, followers, good morning to you all.The book I...
Friends, readers, followers, good morning to you all.
The book I wrote, HAMMER HEAD, comes out on March 16, just under three weeks! (You can pre-order it now.) It’s exciting and nervewracking both, this lead-up to it existing in the world. Besides the usual musings on carpentry and building, the old blog here will be getting a dose of book-related action. Soon I’ll be posting a schedule of readings and events taking place up and down the east coast — I’m hoping to meet a lot of you in person. You guys have been a great group of supporters for this project, and I’m grateful for it.
When I started blogging here on Tumblr some years ago, using it as sort of a public notebook to write about my experiences leaving my journalism job and learning the carpentry trade, I never, never expected that Tumblr would be such a human experience; I never would’ve guessed that I’d find a motley group of passionate, funny, engaged and engaging people — readers, writers, artists, cooks, travelers, enthusiasts of all sort — people who have become pals, people whose work I admire, whose words, images, and ideas have challenged and stimulated and made me die laughing. I feel lucky to be part of something here, lucky to have crossed paths with you in this way. My thanks to you. And now off to lay a floor and grout a tub.
February 19, 2015
The wood, white oak, has the look of driftwood. Weather worn,...
The wood, white oak, has the look of driftwood. Weather worn, sea bashed. The hole, former home of a long-gone knot, brings eyeballs to mind, or portals, entries to other worlds. Two inches thick, the slab got sawed to size yesterday afternoon, from a length of six+ feet to a little over two. In the cold air of yesterday’s afternoon, I sawed, which warmed me fast, and did a first run of sanding with coarse grit paper. Snowbanks have eclipsed the fence behind the house, and snowflakes, more, falling slow and small, landed on the board as I worked. They disappeared, but not for melting — I watched one linger on the wood — but for being sanded into the board, an adding and a stripping at once, layer by layer, instilling and smoothing. This is the beginning of an end table.
February 18, 2015
Trouble with the plumber. He was supposed to come some days
ago...
Trouble with the plumber. He was supposed to come some days
ago and plumb a tub in the house on a Somerville hill we’ve been working on.
But he keeps not coming and the woman who lives there has been left without a
place to bathe for two days now, left instead with a dark-wooded scar in her
bathroom where we amputated an old tub which had leaked for who knows how long
and wrecked wall and ceiling below.
To make up for it, M. and I showed up yesterday morning with
snow shovels and spent the first hours of the day shoveling the driveway.
Another seventeen inches fell over the weekend, and the stretch of drive hadn’t
been touched. We heaved shovelfuls on plow mountains and cleared the drive and
made paths to doors and cleaned sets of steps to porches. Shoveling is not
carpentry. Shoveling would not make the plumber appear. But a couple of hours
of snow removal was, in this case, a simple gesture and a right act to make up
for delays unexpected.
February 14, 2015
Someone told me once many years ago that the correct Hawaiian...
Someone told me once many years ago that the correct Hawaiian pronunciation of aloe is ah-LOW-ee. I don’t know if this is true – I think it’s likely not, but it’s how I say it in my mind. What a comforting set of syllables (ah-low-ee). Three pots sit on the windowsill (ah-low-ee). I found them on the street and brought them home (ah-low-ee). Sometimes a tentacle browns at the tip because the radiator heats it. I snip it off and squeeze the jelly out and rub it on my hands and it feels like I’ve trimmed a bit of lizard tail and extracted some essence from it, clear and thicker than blood, calming balm, ah-low-ee. Outside, it’s blow-ee and still so snow-ee.
February 12, 2015
Impossible to ignore, this snow. There are other things to write...
Impossible to ignore, this snow. There are other things to write about – amputating a busted tub from a bathroom yesterday, someone asking what sort of tool represents the stage of life I’m at right now, botching the answer – but the snow presses and piles and demands to be considered. So I do. The drifts and banks, new hills. What’s under? What’s below? More snow, a sidewalk curb somewhere, a mitten, a car (seats and steering wheel so cold and darker than nightdark, all the light eclipsed. I imagine sitting shotgun in this cold cave, cocooned by winter, and a patient wait for warmth).
A winter storm when I was eight years old, or ten, iced everything. The branches sparkled and drooped, heavy from the weight of frozen water that encased every bough and twig. Twinkling! Magic! Transformed world! On the side yard, a group of birch trees, the branches brushed the ground and created a room inside, a fort with crystal curtains. To crawl in was to disappear, to exit the familiar yard, to be removed from the regular house at the end of a suburban cul de sac, from the world of parents and rules and fruit before dessert. To enter was to exit reality as it existed, a slipping into a new and separate world, not for grown ups or carpets or math quizzes, but for talking chipmunks, orange glow of fires across the night from other friendly forts, incantations in the tinkling of ice on ice as the branches brushed each other in the wind. This fort comes to mind often, not just in the midst of record snows, but when I think of how I’d want a room to feel in a house I’d build. Not in its iciness but in its enclosed and altering power, a mind-shifting space, a sanctuary that disappears you from the world you know.
February 11, 2015
"We want one man to be always thinking and another to be always working. And we call one a gentleman..."
-
John Ruskin.
(With thanks to HilaryEmersonLay, who sent me a postcard with this quote on it.)
February 9, 2015
We were on the hunt for tiny tiles. Sick tacky yellow-blue tiles...
We were on the hunt for tiny tiles. Sick tacky yellow-blue tiles which gave me depression every time I looked at them. The owner of the bathroom of the place we were working on had, ten years ago, tiled his shower floor with them, and they’d started popping off. He had an extra sheet, tiny squares attached to a mesh on the back, and we took it with us to search for a match, like a cop letting dogs smell a shirt of someone on the run.
There’s a stretch of road in Watertown that’s lined with stores for tile. If it’s not already officially known as the Tile Mile, it should be. We stopped at M.’s favorite spot. They confirmed these tiles weren’t meant for shower floors and suggested we head on down the road to M.’s least favorite tile spot, a place I’d heard her talk about, but had never before been in.
“Get ready to be humiliated,” she said looking over her shoulder at me as we headed inside. She gestured with her chin at the sign that said “Please register at the front desk upon entering” and rolled her eyes. The salespeople, coiffed and smooth-talking, were all with other customers, but we were welcome to wander while we waited. We looked at lovely tiles — small rounds the size of pennies, thick squares of earthy terra cotta, antique designs from Italy, hideous gold leaf abominations, muted modern colors in the shape of commas.
A saleswoman with smooth hair wearing stylish black approached. M. showed her the sheet and explained she was looking for a match.
“What a lovely blue,” the woman cooed. She flipped through some samples, asked questions about when they might’ve been bought. M. finally mentioned they were for a client, and that she was hoping, in fact, to get rid of them.
“Phewf,” the woman snorted. “I think we can agree that they’re worth getting rid of!”
“These are the ugliest tiles I’ve ever seen,” I said, flat as I could. The woman shook her head as though to say, “Some people with their taste! Can you even believe!” Forgetting, perhaps, that not five minutes before she’d tried to butter us with “what a lovely blue.”
“Get ready to be humiliated,” M. had said. And though I think she was referring to possible condescension in this high-end tile store, there is something humiliating about being subject to such abject and transparent horseshit in the name of making another sale.
February 6, 2015
We’ve made a space that’s cave-like. Cave-like in the ways you...
We’ve made a space that’s cave-like. Cave-like in the ways you want it to be: tight, warm, enclosed, dim-lit and stone-floored. Cave-like, fort-like, womb-like, secret. It takes you in and holds you there. Maybe I wouldn’t feel this way if it were August – just another storage realm for yuppies on the rise. But deep into this winter, it feels like a good thing to build and a good place to be, this new nook. In a basement of a house on a hill in Somerville, we’ve made this space, bigger than a closet, smaller than a room. M. and I knock into each other, and dance with the ladders to keep out of each other’s way. But building walls still feels like a miracle. Dividing space still feels like a power I shouldn’t possess. And we duck out a small door to get outside after hours underground and face dunes of snow, all the brighter to the eyes after time in a windowless world, and the air feels clearer, and the small birds that gather in the bush nearby, dozens of them, twirping and bouncing from branch to branch, seem happy in the cold. A sudden move and the group of them rises, scattering for a moment then collecting again in the sky, bluer than it’s ever been, and each in-breath is almost painful for the cold air entering warm body, almost painful, but not, and so reminds: how lucky, and how alive.
February 3, 2015
The finished books arrived, twenty of them, hardcover,...
The finished books arrived, twenty of them, hardcover, dust-jacketed. Maybe my favorite part: the bright red spine and that great golden nail that runs down it. In elementary school, Miss Fagenbaum, our sweet young school librarian, showed us that sometimes there were secrets embossed below the jacket. I had these books for days before I slipped the cover off. What a good thing to find below.
You can win a copy of HAMMER HEAD on Goodreads. Enter to win.
You can pre-order it now.
You can buy it at your local bookstore on March 16.
"Birth and death are serious occasions, true, but work is also a...
"Birth and death are serious occasions, true, but work is also a big deal, or it should be. You spend more time at work than you do birthing and dying if you’re only a little bit lucky.
How can you tell that
being able to get a job and going to work is important? For much of
history, women and those marginalized by the culture were prohibited
from doing it.”
Gina Barreca makes a case for hard work in a column for the Hartford Courant.
