Asakiyume mita

One day last summer, I attempted to bring an injured catbird to a wildlife rehabilitation center. Sadly, the bird died in transit, but on the way, I discovered the existence of the Willard House and Clock Museum.



The plaque outside the house contains this thought-provoking statement:

"The realization that time could be spent rather than passed marks a profound change in the way Americans think--and work."

How magical: a whole museum of clocks! I resolved to go as soon as conditions permitted it.

This week they permitted it, and Wakanomori and I went. Our docent, Sarah Mullen, was a fountain of knowledge--literally any question we asked her, she had information on. Including how the original Willards got their land: Apparently the son of an important Nipmuc man wanted his son to have a European education and sent him to school in the Boston area. When the term ended, the school asked for six pieces of silver, and when the boy couldn't pay, the school extracted 300 acres of land from the father. Some of that land was then sold to the grandfather Willard, whose four grandsons (Benjamin, Simon, Ephraim, and Aaron) became the clockmaking Willards. Ah, the colonists. Covering themselves in glory, as usual.

(Interestingly, Grafton, MA, where the Willard House and Clock Museum is located, has land that has remained continuously in the hands of the Nipmuc people.)

The clocks though! Benjamin, the oldest brother, was the least skilled clockmaker, and he limited himself standing clocks. These are less difficult to make because there's more space for all the moving parts.

The face of a Benjamin Willard clock


Cool clockmaking fact: all the gears 'n' stuff inside the clock are called "the movement." The person who makes "the movement" is different from the person who makes the case, who's different from the person who provides the ornamentation and so on. The clockmaker makes the movement, sometimes out of wood, sometimes out of brass (maybe other metals too, but Sarah only mentioned brass).

Simon was the clever brother. He patented a method of fitting all the movement of a standing clock into a clock that could hang on a wall ("It looks like a banjo," Sarah said). He got a patent for this, and these clocks go by the name of "patent timepiece".

Simon Willard's patent timepiece


I asked why they were called "timepieces," and Sarah told me that technically a thing is only a clock if it chimes the hours! And in fact, something can lack a face and numbers, but if it chimes the hours, it's a clock--but if it doesn't chime the hours, it's a timepiece.

Most wall clocks--er, timepieces--had to be wound once a day, whereas the standing clocks only needed to be wound once a week. Here's Sarah setting the time on one.



Aaron Willard made some of the clocks I thought were prettiest. The thing that looks like a smiling peach is not the sun but the moon. The continents rotate up to cover various parts of its face in alignment with the phases of the moon:



Loved the 18th-cent. nomenclature for the places--Barbary, Tartary, and the Great Sea:





( more pictures )

And the house itself was fascinating--a table laid with heavy pewter cutlery; a desk with reading glasses and a tiny book of psalms, a device for rotating a joint as it hangs over the fire, so it will be evenly cooked, a bread oven beside the main fire ... It was a great way to spend an afternoon.

sartorias's really moving entry on places she's lived and what became of them reminded me of a conversation I had yesterday when I went out looking for an iron. I'd been ironing, and mine had given up the ghost, just one sleeve short of a finished shirt. (You know what that means! I finished ironing that sleeve by heating up my cast-iron skillet on the stove. We need full use of all our limbs in this household.)

There were no irons at the supermarket and no irons at the CVS, but at the Dollar Store I hit the jackpot. The cashier, a woman maybe in her forties, was chatty, so I told her the story of ironing the remaining sleeve, and she expressed delight at meeting someone else who used a cast iron skillet and said it was good thinking. I said, "Well, it's what the old irons were made of, after all. My grandmother had a couple of them--she used them as doorstops."

"My great grandmother had some of those, and she used them as doorstops too! She used them to keep us out of her bedroom," the cashier exclaimed. "But I can't picture using one as an actual iron."

"You know those old cast-iron stoves? They used to put the iron right on that, and then when it was hot, you could use it."

"My great-grandmother had one of those stoves!" the cashier said, eyes shining.

"So she could have used the irons as actual irons," I said. "Where did she live?"

"Oh, over in Bondsville. You know where 'the grog shop' is? Across the street from that. It's totally different now though. After she died no one wanted the house--except me; I wanted it, but I couldn't afford it--so they sold it. The new owners totally changed it. I look at it, and it's not--it's just not the same house."

--All that's left are memories and shared stories. But sometimes those can be so vivid, like sartorias's, or the cashier's, and when you share them, they live in someone else's mind, too.

Here's a tailor's stove with an iron on it, courtesy of --Kuerschner 17:20, 1 March 2008 (UTC) - own work, own possession, Public Domain, Link

At around 7:10 in the morning, I saw a spider clamber over this lemon. Apparently I timeshare the kitchen with a spider. It takes the wee, quiet hours, and I take the noisier daylight ones. As you can see from the photo, the spider is now nowhere in sight. It may be chilling on the far side of the lemon--maybe that's the best spot in the whole kitchen? The whole point, from the spider's perspective, of participating in this timeshare? Or maybe, aware of overstaying, it's tucked itself away somewhere else, somewhere nonkitchen.

Or maybe we don't have a timeshare, maybe we have a (much more common) spaceshare. The spider takes the small corners; I get the large expanses. Relatively large. Relatively small. Since I do use the counter, and the lemon, we may have a misunderstanding about terms. Hell, if I'm not sure whether it's a timeshare or a spaceshare or both, I can easily see room for misunderstanding.

This is something that started off as an LJ entry, made a detour as a(n unsuccessful) submission to a magazine, and now returns to its earlier purpose: LJ entry.






While her father examined the various antique doors, complete with their door frames, leaning against one of the long walls of the curio shop, Sharon lingered at the front of the shop, attracted by the fanciest pair of binoculars she'd ever seen. They were standing on a tripod--itself quite fancy, decorated with paintings of men in slashed sleeves and striped doublets, holding falcons and mandolins and ornate cups--and facing out the display window. Through the eyepieces, Sharon could see Cold Spring’s town common, and on the far side of the common, an old-fashioned pickup loaded with hay.

“Hey Dad,” she said, knowing his love of old things extended to cars and trucks, “take a look at this truck!” Sharon glanced behind her when her father didn’t respond and saw that he was deep in conversation with the shop proprietor. A quick look out the window showed that the pickup had already moved on, in any case. But something was odd. Sharon bent to look through the binoculars again, then lifted her head and gazed directly out the window, then repeated this.

On the common, near the low spot that the fire department flooded each winter for ice skating, was the broad stump of a sugar maple that had only this summer been cut down. Through the binoculars, however, Sharon saw a tall, slim tree still decades away from the girth of the stump.

“Whoa,” she breathed. Carefully she turned the binoculars on the tripod, so they pointed diagonally across the common at the liquor store and pizza joint inhabiting the old building at the corner. When she peered through the eyepieces, the FedEx drop box beside the building was gone, as were the air conditioning units in the upper windows. Something about the roof of the building’s porch seemed blurred, but by twisting a butterfly-shaped knob in front of the eyepieces, she was able to make a long sign appear there, with peeling paint and faded letters. Another twist of the knob, and the letters appeared clear and crisp: “Bardwell Dry Goods & General Store,” the y of “Dry” and the e of “Store” ending in flourishes. Sharon gasped as a horse-drawn carriage appeared from behind the store. She tipped the binoculars to pull the scene beyond the store into view and saw apple orchards where a Laundromat, gas station, and nail salon ought to be. She turned the knob several times and the apple orchards dissolved into forest.

“Ah-ah-ah, careful with those,” said the proprietor. With a firm hand on Sharon’s shoulder, she moved the girl away from the binoculars. “They’re from the early eighteenth century, made by Pietro Patroni, the Italian pioneer in chrono-optics. They’re temporal binoculars.”

( Read more... )

An actual pair of binoculars by Pietro Patroni