I have a bunch of beehives at my buddy Dan’s house. The hives are along the bank of a pond. His little valley is surrounded with large trees and flowering shrubs and historical elements of the faded Borden Estate. The witch-hazel blooms, traditionally, in mid-February. I went over to check on my hives. All well -- one weak, the rest are strong -- and all have food and insulation on top, and the right slant to the boxes to drip internal condensation away from the winter clusters. When I was done with my work, I took a break in his wood-working shop. We cracked open new year’s beers. There was a fire in his woodstove.

Some say, I think harshly, Dan, like me, has been nearing retirement most of his life. But Dan did his work and knows wood and in his first life was an expert lumber-grader for big corporations, and later, he trained himself in fancy furniture-making, and commissioned numerous kitchen jobs and cabinetry and the like, all posh. He can build a Louis the 14th chair, or a Stickley couch, a tapered poster-bed with milk-paint.

Danny is one of those rare people who always knows what to do with his leisure time. He is never at a loss for what to do. He never feels guilt for doing the things he loves to do. If he feels like golfing, he goes golfing. If he feels like splitting firewood, he splits wood. Through personal choice and lots of luck, Dan has achieved the freedom he declares for himself. The two of us spend our days doing the things we love to do. We are lucky and we appreciate that, but I don’t think you can say we didn’t work to get to this point, this point of what some might call retirement, but we would rather declare -- following our hearts.

When you walk into the shop you feel the warmth of the stove, smell the shavings of countless species, traces of turpentine, and see the dark water of his pond through the large waist-high windows. Unless frozen solid there is always life on the pond, and there is no ice in sight this winter, so even the fish are rising. Seasonally, he can watch the wood ducks, the red wings nesting in the rushes, the blue heron hunting. Life is still plentiful and diversified on the edge of a wilderness area.

And when you walk in you are bound to find three or four projects spread out before you in different stages of development. Dan is a slow, methodical, precise worker who abhors deadlines and contracts.

Dan has taken up making eggs, large wooden eggs, beautifully carved from single pieces of wood -- cherry, or butternut, or spalted maple. They range from the curious to the spectacular and when you see one you can’t help but touch it, run your hand over the exultant finish. Simple in their concept, they elicit a complex response. They say nothing if not revealing a welcoming joyousness, a sign of peace, like a pineapple means welcome to outsiders, to strangers. Each egg is unique, and Dan’s design becomes more intricate as he goes along in his shy dreamworld, and the eggs have their own built-in single-piece stand, some hexagonal, some even more agonal. Some have ribs like Chinese lanterns, but all reveal a mystery of life, and even though made of wood, they light up the space they are in with a keen, polished self-luminescence.

“Why don’t you sell these things?” I asked. “Take some up to Millspaugh Furniture, have him put them around the showroom. I’ll ask Becky,” I offered.

“He’ll probably want fifty percent,” said Dan, reservedly.

“No, not on an art piece,” I said. “Maybe 20. How much do they get in galleries?”

“No idea,” he said.

“They sure would look good,” I said while he threw on another log.

“Yeah, well,” he said.

The afternoon turned dark during the early grey of the new year, and we solved all the world’s problems and put a lid on it.