When Rita and I left the fleshpots of Boston and Cambridge and moved to Temple nearly forty years ago (forty years!), we made that move with the blessing of our friend Molly Gregory. Molly lived in a modest little apartment she had constructed for herself in the barn of hospitable friends in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Underneath the apartment, on the ground floor in the barn, she had a fully equipped woodworking shop, and outside the barn she had built a smaller barn where she kept a Jersey cow and a flock of chickens. She also had a black poodly mutt officially named Griselda but whom she usually addressed as “Grum.” Grum adored Molly, and so did we, though had we even hinted at such a notion, Molly would probably have made one of her many funny faces and said something like, “Oh, gawrsh, don’t be so silly.”
Although she had grown up on a farm and wound up running the farm at Black Mountain College, where she had gone to teach in 1941, she was, first and foremost, a woodworker, the very best of several first-rate ones it’s been my good luck to know. She could do it all, from designing and building a house to fine cabinetmaking to intricate carvings for a church altar. And along with everything she knew about woods and their properties and tools and their uses, she had an artist’s eye, which she had developed to a high level working with Josef Albers at Black Mountain. Whatever she built, whether barn or sideboard, had clean, simple lines and seemed just made for whatever setting it was in.
Knowing that Rita and I had bought an ancient farmhouse we would have to practically rebuild from the sills up, Molly recruited us to apprentice with her on a couple of renovation jobs, one of them constructing a new living room to add to her own apartment. In retrospect, I wonder if she hadn’t invented that job as much for our benefit as for her own so that we’d get a little more practice in framing and putting up dry wall.
When the time came for us to make our final run to our new home in Temple, Molly gave us three house-warming gifts: a superb Spear & Jackson panel saw, a black cherry cutting board we have used practically every day of our lives ever since, and half a dozen of her chickens to provide us with breakfast eggs in our first year and stew meat in our second. So with a couple of cartons full of chickens in the back of our VW beetle, we moved to Maine. Molly had of course unknowingly given us still another gift: When we knew we would soon have a child to name, we didn’t have to peruse any lists at all. If the baby was a girl, she would be Molly; if a boy, Gregory, and so he turned out to be.
But then, 55 plus 20 makes 75, and 10 more makes 85. Molly had to give up the barn, the Jersey cow, and her “girls” (the chickens), and move to a retirement home where she was not allowed to keep any animals but managed to anyhow. She built a small-scale fire escape, not for herself but for her cat, Sophia, who used that unobtrusive structure to leave and enter Molly’s second-story room day or night, unseen by other residents or the staff. Sophia occasionally brought red squirrels along, too, some alive, who would often find refuge in Molly’s closet.
Work, she believed, was one of life’s great privileges, and unable to run a table saw in her new home, Molly turned to sewing gorgeous quilts and painting her own Christmas cards and note cards in watercolors. They usually had barns and cows and chickens in them.
Molly could, in short, turn old age into art, the approach of death not something to waste time fretting about. Often faced with tough problems, she had always solved them elegantly. Once, when she’d been installing a set of classy and expensive kitchen counters and cabinets, a knot broke out of the middle of one of the counters. What to do? She made an inlay in the shape of a leaping dolphin, converting a disaster into a beautiful decorative detail. “If you can’t hide it,” she said, “feature it.”
The other night, cleaning up after supper, I realized that a crack that had started in Molly’s cutting board was getting longer and deeper. Soon the board will break apart. Molly died two years ago at ninety-three. I can’t ask her to repair that board with her inimitable touch, but what I can do is remember what she told me. I’ll laminate a contrasting strip of wood in between the two halves of that board, featuring the break that can’t be hidden. And then I’ll make sure Molly’s cutting board is one of the things our son, Gregory, takes away from this house when our time for leaving comes.
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