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Health & Fitness

Wood's Versatility is Amazing

Used to create everything from houses to dressers to puppets, wood is a medium that never ceases to inspire.

Working with wood affects people differently I’m sure. As I sanded an old maple chair that has languished in the attic for too many years, I thought of the amazing durability of wood. It may witness many centuries, not only in its original tree form, but also as structures and furnishings. If you have visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you may have seen a chair--a bit different from the ones we sit in, but, nevertheless a chair--from ancient Egypt or a carved icon from the Middle Ages.

Of relatively recent vintage was the small farmhouse my great-grandparents built as homesteaders in Iowa. It was made from walnut wood harvested from what they called "the timber" on the property. Even a closet was made of walnut! The barn and chicken-house were surely made of native wood too. Alas, the life-span of these structures was less than 150 years, but they were demolished only because they were no longer being used by a subsequent owner.

There was a time when whittling a piece of wood was a common pastime. Somehow newer materials such as fiberglass and vinyl don't lend themselves to creative activity in a similar way. When Geppetto asked his friend, the carpenter Antonio, for a scrap of wood to make a puppet, he had a medium that could be transformed from a botanical specimen to a pseudo-human--Pinocchio.

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Wood lends itself to restoration and to renovation in surprising ways. Shortly after we moved to the Lehigh Valley, we went down to my family's home in Bucks County and retrieved a maple dresser that had been in my bedroom as a child. To transport it to Bethlehem, we tied it--securely, we thought--to the top of our car. Yes, you guessed it. It slid off about halfway back. Too badly damaged to be used as a dresser thereafter, the salvaged wood ended up in my husband's basement workshop. There it provided the raw material to be made into a corner shelf for knick-knacks.  

While I'm sanding, I'm waxing philosophical and thinking how valuable wood is--both in its living form as a tree and in its subsequent form as lumber. And I'm wondering if, as with the roughness of a piece of maple, the political-campaign-roughness of human beings can be sanded off. Knock on wood!

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