Little Journey

by Kate Nixon

As some of you readers may know, I recently moved all my conference materials – and myself – into a new office space in Asheville where I will spend the foreseeable future planning the 36th National Arts and Crafts Conference at the Grove Park Inn. Indeed, a moving truck and my car were filled with boxes of office supplies, endless amounts of file folders, plastic bins of thoughtfully stored and inventoried conference items — along with a large library table.

This wooden table will act as my saving grace when I’m walking around the office on the phone or when I need to spread out my notes or my mailing workspace as I create the annual conference attendee packets to be mailed out this December. It is my job to keep the table in the best condition I can as it will be a focal point of my new Arts & Crafts office. So naturally, when I noticed scuffing and an odd stain on the table, I rushed to Lowe’s to grab some supplies since I was determined to bring my library table back to its former glory.

My office library table.

Among the reminders and advice I’ve received from Bruce over the years, one major tip was First, Do No Harm. I knew to stay away from any ammonia-based products from my experience filming Bruce’s “Furniture Care 101” videos; any risk of the finish eroding away should not be taken. I knew the table was in great working condition and despite the scuffs and little impurities, I had a fantastic table on my hands. So when looked down and noticed a bright spot of whitish hardened gunk on my table, I tried to push the thought of it out of my mind. I couldn’t leave it alone.

While wood cleaners/polish have slightly changed their formulas over the years, it’s been suggested over and over again that the combination of damp washcloth is best to wipe away impurities and finishing up with either a think layer of oil or paste wax. So what did I do?

It’s amazing all the imperfections you can locate on something you now find to be in your immediate care. A drop of whitish gunk on my library table.

Damp microfiber cloth in hand, I stared at the white gunk — and I stared at the tempting white can of Purell wipes on my counter. No, I said to myself. First, do no harm. As I gave the surface of the library table a good wipe down, I managed to remove the unknown substance with a minimum amount of friction and succeeded for the most part. Residue could still be seen. If the thought of residue on the table wasn’t enough, I thought back to the image of my movers moving the heavy table, their brows dripping with sweat droplets from moving in the summer heat. Sweat on my new table in a post Covid-era when it seems like a new strain was coming up every season and I swore I saw a dried watermark.

Before I knew what I was doing, a damp Purell sheet was wrapped around my index finger and I was pointing at the residued area, determined to apply the sanitizing ingredient in the smallest area possible. A fingerpad sized area.

Somewhere in the back of my head, my inner voice screamed “Warm rag with a little bit of soap on it!!”

Long story short, I had given into temptation, even though my brain knew that warm water and soap would most likely do the trick. The table looks fine, but I still look back in regret for doing a fingerpad-sized diameter of harm to my library table. It’s the most sanitized area of my table, but still, warm water and soap next time.

“That’s the only thing you can do with a mess. Start cleaning it up, a little at a time.” – Lisa Wingate

Kate

In 1978, I left a secure job as a high school English teacher, determined to make it as a professional writer. I cashed in my meager state retirement account to tide me over until I wrote my first best-selling novel, but a year later the plants in my apartment had all died from over-watering, my savings was depleted, and I hadn’t made it past chapter three. The problem, of course, was that my 28 years had all been trauma-free: my parents never beat me, my friends never betrayed me, and the government never sent me to Vietnam.

And so, I got what my father would have called “a real job.”

I went to work as a part-time antiques refinisher and woodworker at House of Wood in Iowa City. Frustrated at how it was being managed, I soon saved up enough money to put down a deposit and first month’s rent on a small workshop space, then opened Knock On Wood: Antique Repair and Restoration. I wasn’t about to give up on my dream, however, so I began writing about something I knew – refinishing antiques.

And I got published.

Next door to Knock On Wood was a small Irish bar called Fitzpatrick’s. Long and narrow, it had a dark mahogany bar on one side, a half-dozen booths on the other, and a pool table in the back. As often happens, it became a hang-out for graduate students enrolled in the University of Iowa’s illustrious Writer’s Workshop program. After hanging up my apron and locking the door, I would slide over as well, more because of my friendship with Gary Fitzpatrick than to sit and listen to grad students whining about why publishers and editors were always rejecting their novels and short stories.

When they found out from Gary I had been published, I might as well have announced I had leprosy. But then I heard them laughing to each other: “His was non-fiction.”

Non-fiction.

It didn’t even warrant its own name. How’s that for spawning an inferiority complex?

But just as every English major dreams of being a writer, every writer dreams of having a best-selling novel.

After writing several other books, I also took a shot at writing an historical novel. Turns out mine had far better history in it than fiction. My novel took place in 1918 inside the Grove Park Inn, about which I had also written two history books.

(Notice how I avoided calling them “non-fiction”?)

Now, however, as I have the luxury of deciding what book I want to write next, I know that I would rather research, record, and interpret history than invent more cardboard characters and shallow plots.

Most novels, you know, can flame out as quickly as Haley’s Comet, eventually ending up on the discount table at Mr. K’s used book store. (At least mine did.)

But history books?

They stay on your shelves . . . .

Until next time,

“Any fool can make history, but it takes work to write one.” – Oscar Wilde

Bruce

As do-it-yourself Arts and Crafts landscapers, we all have to make a choice: rock or wood?

Last summer, I watched as a neighbor of ours struggled to install several eight-foot long 4” x 4” landscape timbers on a steep bank which he and his wife were wanting to plant shrubs. By the time I saw what they were doing, the project was nearly done, so I kept my opinions to myself. Ten years ago, you see, I had done the same, opting for the speed and convenience of a wood retaining wall versus the extra time and strength required to construct a rock wall.

My low wood walls looked fine when I finished securing them to the ground with long spikes, but last week I stepped on one as I was pruning a mature evergreen shrub. In a flash both it and I were sliding down the steep bank. It was a soft landing, but I groaned regardless, as I reached over and felt the rotted wood crumble under my fingers.

As anyone who has researched it knows, what is labeled as “exterior pressure-treated wood” is not recommended for “ground contact.” It’s in the fine print. When able to dry between rain storms, pressure-treated wood will far outlast standard wood. When it remains in contact with the ground, however, the constant contact with moisture soon leads to rot, decay, and trouble.

To be honest, I think I knew at the time that the landscape timbers would eventually rot, but the thought of hauling all of the required rocks down the slope and struggling to fit them together was discouraging. So, I took the easy route. Now, however, my task is even greater, not simply because my back and knees are ten years older, but because I have to carefully work around the branches and the roots of our ten-year-old shrubs as I haul out the rotted timbers, level the ground where they had been, and start dry-stacking rocks to prevent the soil from washing down the bank with each rain.

Rock walls, as I have also learned, don’t require a degree in masonry. Once I have moved all of my rocks into a loose pile next to the site, I actually enjoy picking them up one by one and fitting their irregularities together. I don’t use mortar to adhere them to one another, as I purposely lean each layer of rocks toward the hillside, backfilling the area behind them with dirt as I go.

Obviously, these dry-stack walls are not intended to withstand hundreds of pounds of pressure, but work fine to stabilize a slope and to create shallow terraces well-suited for planting shrubs and flowers behind them.

And when you are finished, you have created a wall that looks more natural than wood – and won’t ever rot.

Until next week,

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

– Robert Frost from “Mending Wall”

Bruce

There was never any doubt about the collection.

For nearly three decades, Rudy Ciccarello has been buying, both privately and at shows and auctions, the best of the best of the Arts and Crafts movement, from highly-anticipated Gustav Stickley furniture and Roycroft metalware to the lesser-known fields of early twentieth century pictorialism photography, woodblock prints, and ephemera.

What remained to be seen was just how his collection, unparalleled both in expanse and depth, would be presented.

As the five-story, 137,000 square-foot museum in downtown St. Petersburg, Florida was being constructed, a few naysayers questioned the decision by Ciccarello and the firm of Alfonso Architects to house an Arts and Crafts collection in a modernistic building. Besides the futility of attempting to design a five-story Arts and Crafts bungalow, anyone who has spent time in an authentic Arts and Crafts home knows that the dark oak and copper furnishings must often struggle just to be seen, yet alone studied and appreciated, when set against dark paneling or earth-tone walls barely illuminated by amber mica and stained-glass lighting.

Instead, Alberto Alfonso chose to display Ciccarello’s collection not as if it were in a house museum, but rather as if it were in an art museum. If the goal of the founders of the Arts and Crafts movement was to raise the status of the craftsman to that of the artist, then one of the goals of the architect was to raise the status of the Arts and Crafts movement to that of such recognized art movements as Impressionism, Cubism, and Classicism.

And it worked.

The five-story atrium is a shower of sunlight, enabling visitors to immediately appreciate each piece on display. While the museum does contain a few room settings, the vast majority of pieces, from an early Gustav Stickley Morris chair to a Greene and Greene lantern, are easily examined, studied, and appreciated, often from 360-degrees.

I’m not sure if anyone knows how many pieces are in Rudy Ciccarello’s collection, but he wisely did not attempt to cram them all into his museum – as so many of us do in our homes. Those selected for this initial display are given space to breath, and are positioned in such a way to allow visitors to appreciate every detail in their design and construction.

And knowing there are hundreds more examples awaiting their turn to be on display will bring us all back more return visits.

Until next week,

 

“It’s not a museum. It’s not a place of artifacts. It’s a place of ideas.” – Jeanie Kahnke

Bruce

For more information, please go to: https://www.museumaacm.org/

PS – And we loved downtown St. Petersburg! Dog-friendly, people-friendly, and easy to walk to shops, galleries, and outdoor dining restaurants.

It all started at my grandmother’s kitchen table, a late 19^th-century walnut dropleaf table she and my grandfather had bought second-hand from Maurice Peterson during the Great Depression, just after they first started farming on eighty acres of rented Illinois prairie. It was worn, but well-polished, with annual coats of glossy shellac applied with a hog-bristle brush my grandmother carefully cleaned with denatured alcohol after each spring’s application.

On this day the table had been carefully rolled on its four oiled porcelain castors across the varnished heart pine kitchen floor until there was room enough to raise both oval dropleaves until the hidden iron supports snapped reassuringly into place, providing a ten-year-old boy with ample room to plant both his elbows. From a Woolworth’s department store bag my grandmother pulled out my birthday present: five blue folding Whitman coin books, one each for Lincoln pennies, Jefferson nickels, Roosevelt dimes, Washington quarters, and Franklin half dollars. The rows of empty slots beckoned me like a lighthouse to a wandering sailor. Beneath each slot was printed the year and location where each coin had been minted: 1914-D for Denver; 1914-S for San Francisco; and no letter beneath the date indicated the source had been the Philadelphia mint.

As I sat in my grandmother’s kitchen with my empty Whitman folder opened before me, to my amazement, my grandmother poured a Folger’s coffee can of Lincoln pennies out across her walnut table. In my young life I had never seen so many gleaming copper pennies. As my mother began turning them over, face up, I picked up the first penny, read the date and mint mark, found its empty slot, and pressed it into its new home with my thumb. My grandmother beamed with pride, explaining to me that since a child she had always saved any pennies she had found for good luck.

Unless it was in better condition, any duplicate went back into her Folger’s can and returned to a shelf in the basement behind the carefully labeled jars of stewed tomatoes we had picked from my mother’s garden. We sorted through three cans of Lincoln pennies that day, and all three cans of lucky pennies were most likely still on the shelf in her basement when my grandmother gently passed away in her sleep at the age of 92.

Finished, I looked up at her. She pointed to my Whitman folder, where all but one of the critical 1909 slots had been filled.

“I had all of them,” she explained. “My mother died in 1909, when I was four, and so later I decided to save every 1909 penny I could find, in her memory, which is what started me saving pennies. And I know more than one of them had an “S” on it. I thought I had put them all in one of these cans.”

Of course, the one coin which was missing was the rarest of them all: the 1909-S with the initials “V.D.B.” honoring the designer Victor D. Brenner.

That day she and my mother went through all of her cupboards, desks, and drawers looking for it, while I continued to marvel over the number of slots I had already filled, but the rare San Francisco penny which Victor D. Brenner had designed was never found.

And that was the one I never could bring myself to buy. I still have my blue Whitman folder, open here beside me right now, with nearly every slot from 1909 through 1940 filled, with just one exception. Each time I had the opportunity, each time I started to reach for my checkbook tucked in my back pocket, I figured this time I would buy it, just to finally complete that inaugural year of 1909.

But, so far, it has never seemed quite right.

Until next week,

“Often, the story of an artifact’s journey is more remarkable than the object itself.” ― Mackenzie Finklea, author

Bruce

A funny thing happened at an auction last Friday.

Nothing.

We are all familiar with what antique auctions used to be: a combination of an educational experience and an enjoyable social event subtly disguising a range of hidden emotions — from anticipation and nervousness to competitiveness and greed.

Those auctions often began with a live preview, which amounted to a leisurely stroll around the gallery, chatting with friends, but always wondering if they were after the same thing as you. After casually walking past the item which drew you there, pretending not to have even noticed it, you circle back around, like a petty thief casing a convenience store, watching to see who might be watching you.

First, you admired it from a distance, but gradually you drew closer, pretending to be interested in the items alongside it, until you let your eyes wander over, absorbing every detail in split-second glances like a trained CIA agent. Only when others gathered around it would you feel like you could turn to it, joining their casual conversation, sizing up your competition as you began imagining where you would place it in your home.

On auction day you are up early, studying the auction catalog, which now falls open to the page you have been memorizing. You arrive early, just in case your item might be called up by the auctioneer sooner than expected. By now you aren’t studying the piece as much as you are the crowd, checking out your potential competition, all the while knowing some will be telephoning their bids to the row of auction staff seated at their tables in clear view of the auctioneer.

Bidding was like running a race with a moving finish line. Refusing to raise your hand when the auctioneer smiled at you seemed as unthinkable as quitting in the middle of the race, even though you doubted if you had the stamina to stay to the end. When we won, we were as elated as Olympians. When we lost, we were crushed, swearing we would never put ourselves through it again, all the while knowing the caldron of emotions which Macbeth’s witches had stirred inside us made us feel alive again.

Last week’s auction began not with a catalog, but with a computer screen of detailed descriptions and multiple images. So many images, in fact, that a live preview seemed unnecessary. In fact, attending the auction in person seemed unnecessary, as I could keep working at home, popping in occasionally to refresh my screen and calculate the hours and minutes until my item would appear.

And when it did, no auctioneer, no competitive spirit, no emotional attachment was there to coax me into raising my hand. Clicking the “Bid Now” button was easy, but it was just as easy not to. I hadn’t touched the item, picked it up, turned it over, or even imagined what it would look like in our home. It began, it remained, and it ended just an image on my screen.

Afterwards, I did not feel crushed. I did not even feel a mild disappointment.

I simply went back to what I had been doing.

Until next week,

“Emotions can get in the way – or can get you on your way.” – Mavis Mazhura

Bruce

Fall, it seems, always seems to bring with it a sense of urgency, an accounting of which of our spring and summer projects actually made it to completion. As content as I might temporarily have been with what I did get done in those optimistic days of spring and the warm afternoons of summer, I dislike going into winter with another year’s project still on my list of things to do.

Back in 1993, I bought an empty lot on a dead-end road on Lake Lure, the site of much of the filming of “Dirty Dancing.” Today the 1926 lake and town are undergoing a renaissance, but back then it was a nearly forgotten little lake tucked in amid soft, gentle mountains. It took me three years to pay off the mortgage and another two years to build a modest cottage for us, but with it only being thirty-five minutes from our home outside Asheville, we come here nearly every week.

I’m there as I write this, as I am determined to complete a flagstone patio I have been planning for our small back yard. This will be my third attempt at a backyard project here. The grass I planted after the house was finished in 1998 always needed mowing, until one summer, when we hit a drought, it died. I then covered the area with a pressure-treated deck, which looked fine for about ten years, until it, too, died under a wilting sun. This summer I hired a crew of young, strong men to cut it into pieces with chain saws before hauling it away, leaving my little yard looking just as it had when I arrived in 1993.

Hopefully, my third attempt will require less maintenance and will prove to be more permanent, but permanence comes with a price tag, as flagstones and bags of concrete cost more than grass seed – in more ways than one. Our small back yard is located thirty feet below the road above our house. It sits in a large hole, hemmed in by our house on one side, our neighbor’s house at the other, the lake on the front, and a 30-foot road embankment on the back.

This means all of my materials, from tools and forms to sixty-pound bags of concrete and piles of rocks, have to be carried, lowered, or slid down into the hole.

It’s a young man’s project, one I have no business undertaking, as one slip on the wet embankment or one awkward lift of a bag of concrete could reawaken my old back spasms. But I was raised by a father whose motto was to only call in a professional after you have tried doing it yourself.

And so, this week I have lowered the first twenty-three bags of concrete down my slide, assembled my new cement mixer, and pounded in the stakes holding my first set of forms. In a little while I’ll start mixing concrete with water, experimenting with amounts of each to obtain the perfect consistency to slide out of my wheelbarrow and into my forms, before I start tapping flagstones into it with the handle of my trowel.

Wish me luck, as I will need it!

Until next week,

“Done is better than perfect.” — anonymous

Bruce