Out of the Mist of Memory

Not a lot of sleep last night. Caught a little this morning. Already warmed up from a long email I wrote just a few minutes ago. My hands are feeling pretty good right now. I wish I had something on deck to write. I haven't been able to pull together an idea for a story and so I've been idling along writing little essays. It doesn't work to stretch my mind well. I need a story to flesh out.

I thought I had something from the Jonathon Strange movies I've been watching but nothing coalesced. Now I think of maybe a story of a cabinet maker who is commissioned to make a box out of an exotic wood. The commission comes from a strange man who visits him after hours, never in company and never when anyone else can see him. The dimensions are exact and the design is very specific. The maker wonders about its purpose.

I would have to go back and pull a few details out about woodworking and the story of the maker. He must have a story to explain his ability to work alone and with detail. He cannot work for money. He must have means of life separate from the work he does.

I like where this goes in my mind. The two must come together in the story. As he works alone in his little shop he must remember things. Jobs he's done in the past. What happened to his wife and family? Why does he carry on in this lonely life? Did he make the coffins for his family? There is a connection to the occult here. Maybe skills received in exchange for a job or a line of jobs. That he becomes a casket (in the larger sense) maker to the select, the hidden, the ones that move in the shadows.

I need to think about his past. What did he do before the wood? What year does this take place in? Maybe the years after the Civil War. Maybe the years after World War 2. Maybe he was badly wounded during WW2 and took up the wood when he inherited his grandfather's woodshop in southern Missouri. He limps. His family property in Missouri with stone house and outbuildings.

There's a lot of backstory here. What does the wood shop look like? It's heated by a large iron woodstove. His property is wooded. 5 different oaks including red, bur, chinkapin & White oak, butternut, of course American elm, black walnut, white ash, eastern red cedar, black locust Some of the trees are more than 150 years old.

And suddenly, I'm back in the files and books, researching the underpinnings of the story and from the empty to tabletop to making lists and thinking of sentences, the story has arrived almost as if on its own. I can see this is going to be a big one and will take some time.

It's important that I go there first to scout things out. I need to see the worn thresholds and steps leading in and out of places. I need to try out the drive from the main road out through the forest to the house and how the dogs and cats let him know when someone has come off the road. And when the car arrives at the house but the dogs and cats let him know it's someone important.

He buried is utility lines to the house some time ago. He has a well that was dug by his great-grandfather in 1842. His family had purchased 6 square miles or 3840 acres of the forest land in southeastern Missouri, the Ozarks, in 1840 and at the northern edge of what would be the Mark Twain National Forest in 1939 near what is now the unincorporated community of Huzzah, named for the nearby Huzzah Creek.

It looks as though I have my next story getting ready. It would be nice to have some drama ready for this.

This guy lives in this neat place alone. Something happened to his family and they're buried there somewhere. He has dogs, more than 2, he has cats several. He lives in a stone house keeps to himself. He works wood in the little shop of his grandfather. He makes boxes. The boxes are special. He uses only hand tools. no power tools. This takes place in the late 1940s.

Where's the problem? He has no one to leave all this to. His children died. Maybe he invites a distant relative young man to be apprenticed to him with the hope of leaving this to him.

He has money. Money he inherited, makes money making special boxes for select group of clients. Word of mouth. Remember this is 1940s.

I'd better get on with it.

More later,