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61 How the Things We Work On, Work On Us A blue horse from a carousel in Atlantic City stood looking shocked on the barn floor for days, the wind moving through its poplar mane. A thousand rickety Windsor chairs, tables and dressers and secret boxes of mahogany, rosewood and pearl. We’ve worked on half of the objects ever made in the world is how it feels though it must be more.Walnut four-paneled eight-foot doors, a mirror Jefferson gazed back at, bookcases that twirl, wardrobes and canes. Ten thousand times a thousand things made badly or with genius have passed through this place, each one its own special challenge, its own set of troubles. Everything busted by hard use. Farm tables grooved by the butcher’s knife, tables marred with bloodstains, scorch marks, or water. Sewing machines from Singer, Victrolas and violas busted open and bared, all of it smashed and ruined and fallen out of use by neglect and disrepair and the shit of creatures that lurk wherever Grandmother’s father’s things are stored. Two carved lions on a Morris chair roar. Roll-top desks fall apart on the floor. The pretty olive-wood head of an eighteenth-century girl stares out the window, her slender nose broken. Here is a commode from Florence, a cedar trunk from Rome, the strange furnishings of a home. When you walk in the front door of our shop, stairs jump up and if you happen to look in the air as you climb you will see an enormous oak eagle with a broken claw hovering above you. It has been there for years. And the chair Frederick Douglass sat in while working at his desk was here all summer. We did very little with it, repaired a caster, waxed it. Walking by, I liked to caress the canvas where his back would rest, where his scarred back would lean lightly and rest. He knew how things persist. I’m learning. The ordinary is always a sacred object. ...

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