The Lumber Pile…

One duuude’s mess of wood is another duuude’s treasure to horde…

In “The Hobbit”, Smaug wrapped his heavy serpentine coils over his pile of treasure, encrusting his vulnerable underbelly with impenetrable gems from his hoard.

Although I view my pile of treasured hardwood with the same hunger and greed that consumed Smaug, you do not want to see me wrapped sinuously about my treasure. Believe me. And me exposing my wood chip and bark-encrusted underside will not fill you with the same awe and dread that Bilbo felt when Smaug showed off the impenetrable gemstone armor covering his weak belly scales.

“My armour is like tenfold shields, my teeth are swords, my claws spears, the shock of my tail is a thunderbolt, my wings a hurricane, and my breath death!”

Well, my kids would tell you that the last bit perfectly describes my exhalations:

But here in my basement are our trees, probably cut down in the prime of their lives, sacrificed like soldiers ordered to war, ranks upon ranks of the best of our young men, poets and philosophers, writers and engineers, scythed down like crops in the fall, fighting for each other and for us, Marathon and Thermopylae, Agincourt and Waterloo, Gettysburg and Somme, Stalingrad and Normandy, through to Iraq and Afghanistan today, names of battles that will live far longer than any of those who fought and died there… but unlike soldiers, the names of the trees will live long after the battles where they fought and died. They have given us their bones, treasure beyond measure, with which to make our homes and memories and comforts, the encrustations of our lives, embedded in our skins as we live and work and eat and play. Tables and chairs and cabinets and shelves, made with our hands and hearts.

There’s cherry and maple and walnut and birch and ash and oak, the royalty of the trees, laid out in their sarcophagi arrayed in the crypts beneath my home. They rest there, whispering to each other. Their voices are not of vengeful wights screaming implacable furies into a cold mist… no these are warm whispers of hope. The walnut wants to be a table. The cherry a cabinet hung with care from a boy’s room. The maple is not sure, but likes the live-edged cherry and asks if they can be friends, she a bright figured panel framed forever by the dark wood’s embrace.

A light snaps on and the chattering whispers fall silent.

My boots clomp down the basement stairs and I look over fondly at my pile of wood. There’s the light maple board, lined with beautiful colored tracks in an otherwise bone-white wood. The tracks are caused by a beetle infestation which the tree self-treats with a chemical. Woodworkers call this wormy maple. This wormy maple also has a hint of curly tiger-striped grain. Yes, she’s a beauty. The maple sits atop a cherry board, a live-edged cut with both the dark red heartwood in the center and lighter sapwood framing both sides. That cherry board sits atop a thick birch board, a sister of which I made into a simple long bench with walnut legs.

Before that bench I made a much smaller bench from a single beautifully figured birch board, also pairing it with similarly tapered walnut legs:

There is a stack of several thick walnut boards, the bark still thick in places but now mostly falling off. These all came from one tree and I brought all of them home because I knew they had something special inside. I took one of those boards a couple years ago and made a coffee table from it.

These particular walnut boards were cut from the crotch of the tree, where two major branches meet. The grain, in my limited experience, typically shows tremendous drama at such dendritic intersections, a work of art begging to be revealed. That proved true with the coffee table. You can see a remnant of the crotch where the edge of the table suddenly changes from wide to narrow. You can easily see the intricate patterns the grain takes right around this very area.

There’s more treasure in the remaining walnut boards, waiting for me to be brave enough to go back in there and do the work to open it up. I wrote several pieces about my disaster making that coffee table:

I am like the crazy cat lady who collects cats, has way more cats than she can manage or even feed. I have way more boards than I have projects or even ideas.

But that’s OK. The boards have value in their potential, their hidden beauty. I recognize that I have the disease of a hoarder, a dragon sitting on its pile of treasure, hidden in a cave, deep under a mountain, far from society, from trade and usefulness and sanity.

But that’s OK. Because there’s more to my woodpile, stacked here and there:

Like Smaug, I know each board of wood in this pile of treasure. If a hobbit, or more likely one of my kids (who love and identify with the hobbits), so much as takes a piece of the shedding bark from one of the boards, I’ll know.

So don’t even think about it…