I arrived at the village on an October afternoon when the maples along the turnpike had gone the color of old varnish. Three hours south of Lexington, past tobacco barns and limestone cuts. In the Meetinghouse south hall, a rocking chair waited beneath a row of wall pegs, its ash slats worn smooth where seventy years of hands had gripped them to stand.
Proportions That Remember the Body
The chair-makers did not work from measured drawings. They worked from bodies. A Shaker brother would sit on the workshop floor while another traced the curve of his spine with a batten — the same method coopers used to shape barrel staves. The resulting profile was not a design. It was a record of how a body rests when it trusts the object beneath it.
The best chair is the one you forget you are sitting in. It has done its work when you no longer notice it.
Eldress Martha Shepherd, 1863