Mirrors

I completed the other chair today. Both the offspring seemed pleased with their lot and the seats seem to make a happy pair. I like the fact that they are made from the same log and the same old car spring. The plank that the seats came from was cut across the middle and if you placed the front edges facing each other you could trace the grain across from one to the other. The grain in the backs is very close to a mirror image with the main heart of the tree running through the pad shaped arm.
Counting the rings showed that the tree had been around for more than 75 years at the height where these pieces were cut, but judging from the size of the rotted branch in the section of wood that I cut up to make these it must have been quite a few meters off the ground, so the tree may have been around for as many as a hundred years before it was cut down.
Come February the chipping machine will visit the stockyard and the mountains of wood there will be turned into mountains of chips, it is nice to have been able to pull these bits from the maw so that they can remain in the world in this shape for a while longer. Increasingly I feel the sense of responsibility in undertaking the task of making objects as the awareness of my own age and mortality make it more obvious that these objects will still be around when I am not.
Fortunately there are amusing nuances to the process that prevent us from lingering on the nature of numbers for too long. In this case as with some other individuals among the Zelkova species that I have encountered in the past there was a tendency to pong when fresh cut, this chap's severed bits left the piquant pooh smell lingering in the living room for a while. That caused some suspicious glances to be exchanged, thankfully the fragrance is fading fast.