‘Come on by for a visit,’ I emailed back. “Squeeze hard,” I said. She stepped into the shop from the January snow outside. There are clean towels in the cupboard. She poked around a little then said, “Go have your shower.”
I came back downstairs after my shower, dressed, as usual in sweatpants and a tee-shirt. The artistic element was usually conceived by someone else. Her experience was working in retail. Sometimes I’d offer a little advice on her technique, usually by suggesting a different tool for a given application. “We can flush the toilet once, but it won’t fill up again. Depending on the carving, with three or more templates, ninety or ninety-five percent or so of the wood is removed for the bas-relief carving. Caitlyn wasn’t anything like I’d expected. “So this is it,” I said waving my hand through the air, “this is the shop.”
She looked around for a moment and then said, “What exactly do you do?”
“Commercial wood carving, signs, railings, balusters, odd bits, some furniture restoration, always in wood.”
She picked up one of
