I voiced to someone that I wanted to work with a farmer for a day – I had visions of sheep and livestock, but ended up out at the olive orchard. The 10 workers shaking down the trees were all women, while the 3 men seemed set themselves to daily prayers, tea drinking and talking – interspersed with bouts of driving the pickup around. Actually for the men was reserved some difficult of removing burled and old root masses from the trees to allow new roots to grow and bring in water for the tree. The owner of the orchard, Abdul Rachman, had just had a surgery in Jordan, and the other man was lazy or tired and taking it easy by the time I reached there. So I had plenty of opportunity to swing the sledge and work my hands raw. Towards the end of my 2 hours there, we ate and my ride declared it was time to head back. I decided that I would go back the next day and take Yvette with me as there is something very connecting to a place about working in it. I took one of the burls with me to remember the experience and perhaps make into a bowl or sculpture.
The next day I did return and brought food for the crew – that was a fun shopping experience. I also developed an appreciation (through the lack of one) of a balanced sledge hammer with a straight and smooth handle that doesn’t twist in ones hands. I was a fine mess by the time the big burly worker arrived with calluses the thickness of my hands, but now 1 month on my hands have returned to their untoughened selves... while the connections formed by work remain strong and vivid.
The olive wood burl had grown over the last 150 years, and having hacked it out of the earth I saw the beauty in its twists and turns and gnarls. It takes time to appreciate this type of beauty – it is the beauty of working hands, of fisherman faces shaped by a life of facing into the saltwater and sun, it is found in the patina of Italian stones taking their knocks since antiquity.
As we neared the end of our Syrian sojourn, we finally met our neighbor - the artist who had painted our room and restored much of our house. His house was lovely with carved plaster work, paintings, calligraphy, a stalactite decoration commom since the Syrian Ayyubid era, a 16 meter deep well and well chosen artifacts, textiles and art pieces adorning the walls and niches … We had tried to look at this home before, but had no response from our phone calls, emails, and notes left on the door. It turned out he was in Spain with his Spanish wife, but by coincidence we ended up renting a house 3 doors down from his in the old city.
I wanted to turn the burl into a bowl and found a shop with a band saw to begin the project by flattening one side. It turns out our neighbor – Achmed #101 as we came to know him – has a brother who is a wood turner and a phone call or two later found me with the lump of burl riding through the city streets to a back alley shop with a 3” padlock and 4 lathes and wood shavings aplenty. In the end I think my language ability had pegged my competence level around 7 years old, and so I wasn’t entrusted with the gouges and chippers that pared down the burl to a 9” bowl.
And while my skill level on a lathe definitely couldn’t match his, my carefulness would have compensated his cavalier-ness… I spied some calipers on the wall, and had even gotten them down, but in the end they weren’t used and the bottom was thinned two much for the jam to have structurally integrity. The gouge caught some of the twisted grain and torque the center of the bowl out of the wood. A dime sized whole now present in the bottom as though to drain a plant. I hid my disappointment and I think he hid his as well and we agreed that we would call it a feature – make up a story to tell of its function rather than admit the carelessness and the flawed execution of the desired product.
The olive wood smells of Mediterranean cuisine and begs one to just add tomatoes and crushed salt and basil to its aromas. It burns wonderfully as well – a fate that most of this burl’s neighbors endured after a lifetime of giving water – an irony of all wood destined for the flames really. I saved a small chunk from the burl that had been band sawed off to make a spoon to accompany the bowl, and my last full day in Syria I got the chance.
Achmed #101 had also introduced us to a master carpenter who specializes in Arabesque. He is an artist with wood, a humble, diligent and knowledgeable craftsman. I asked if I might work with him for a day, and he welcomed me to his shop, and although my language skills continue to bring my competence into question, he eventually entrusted me with the saws and I spent 6 hours table sawing, band sawing, chop sawing, and shaping 120 Arabesque mahogany pieces for a panel they were working on. My day was interspersed with lessons on the crosscutting, food and drink, band saw blade sharpening, coiling and uncoiling the 12 foot blade, using compasses and dividers for layout, jigs for making repetitive angular cuts, tips for avoiding tear-out, antique woodwork show-and-tells of the deteriorating 200 year old door panel he was commissioned to reconstruct using the same joinery techniques. 
That day was capped by an evening at his house – joined by Yvette and her family – where we were served up khanoon music and singing and dancing and food. The source of the carpenter’s compassion and sparkle evident in his parents faces who joined us and laughed and danced and urged us on to eat and sing and communicate and photograph.
The carpenter gave me an open invitation to come back. I arranged my last day to skip out on the final walk-through and financial settling of accounts with our landlord of our house so that I could spend 3 more hours in his shop. I brought my wooden burl with me that I wanted to turn into a spoon, and this soon became the project of the morning. He helped and supervised me and it felt like shop class as he suggested ways for me to make the saw take only the wood… In the next phase of the project he pulled from a drawer an old gouge and after watching my technique, sharpened it and gave me a few pointers. By then he had started to make a giant spoon, showing me how he would rough it out of a 3” log and stopping at each step to check with me as to the shape it should be and if that was what I wanted (my language skills not good enough to say that I only wanted one spoon – a memory more than a utensil, but of course I was getting a lesson and a memory which was doubly valuable to me).The spoon is with me now, the bowl having made its way with family back to the states to await reunion in June. The spoon is very rough. I still need to work the edges and gouge out some more, but time did not permit a finished product my last day… But the memory of work on the trees, and the wood, and the bowl, and my spoon – one of my few tangibly productive acts in Syria – reminds me that work is a gift that connects us and imbues us with meaning and gives an outlet for creativity and creates things of beauty and develops our character and our friendships, and that I have been blessed throughout my life to have it.
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