Bottled dreams – Part One

He gets up early to do his crafts.  He should take advantage of the sunlight; his eyes, tired out by the years spent in classrooms and workshops, don’t resist now working in artificial light.  When arthritis—which he attributes, despite what the doctor says, on no longer having the heat from the smelting ovens—allows it, he works the whole morning.  He has a vast repertoire, based on years of experience and the need to sell.  If there is electricity, he makes woodburning pieces, if it’s off, he carves figures in wood.  He prepares the articles in advance, depending on what celebration is coming up.  The lack of options for gifts and his low prices guarantee that all his pieces sell.  Many clients visit his home to ask for personalized details.  It’s common to see, on the path leading to his house, buyers lining up in the days prior to February 14 and March 8.  With the healthy pride of a creator, he boasts of having contributed to the decline of the divorce rate and in the increase in loving stability among the couples in the town.

At noon, lunch and a nap.  In the evening, he goes out to find raw materials for his workshop.  It’s the most distressing part of his operation, with the scarcity of wood and the tangle of existing prohibitions.  Several trees considered to be precious wood grow in his yard.  If you manage to get permission to cut them down, you can’t keep the wood.  It must be sold as communal timber to a forest company that didn’t plant it and that doesn’t care about the fate of the trees.  The forest company sells the wood to another company, that is dedicated to providing it to artists and craftsmen at a higher price, as befits the precious wood.  And the last company, when it sells it to him, will add on something to cover expenses.   He, as the interested party, must take care of all the negotiations and ensure that the wood doesn’t get lost during this long peregrination.  This has forced him to use materials much easier to obtain, such as branches, bark and seeds, carpentry leftovers and even wood recovered from construction forms.  As a young man he dreamed of making sailboats in bottles, like he saw on television; today he makes little bottles inside penicillin vials.  He’s a minimalist by obligation.