IF YOU THINK YOU ARE A BROKEN IMPERFECT PERSON

I HAVE AN OLD OAK YOU NEED TO VISIT

Imagine if you will a dark night in the woods with a heavy ice storm building layers of ice on the trees. There are no regular insects or animal noises because it’s the dead of winter but the air is filled with loud and spooky moaning, groaning, snaps with trees straining under ice weight — then limbs popping like gunfire followed by ice crystals crashing like huge plate glass as a limb or tree falls to the ground. Your heartbeat and breath seem to be vulnerable, about to be sucked away by the enormity of something gigantic and looming all around in the darkness.

Much as you would flee this other worldly disorientating, forbidding and cold to the bone place — it’s not an opinion. The falling trees have knocked down fence and your cattle are spooked ready to bolt so you go on cutting back limbs and re-stretching cold barbed wire. Your gloved hands are so cold they will hurt for days.

Later the aftermath is surveyed and one of the 75 or 85 year old oaks that was in soft earth by the seasonal creek has been pulled down. You labor for 1/2 a day and use the tractor to take the big trunk to the neighbor who has a saw mill. Eventually he mills the old oak and it goes in a barn under spacers and weights to dry the old fashion way. No kiln for this old oak.

Finally comes the day when the planned staircase to the upstairs loft is to be built. Using machines like a plank planer and a table saw that grandfather would have dreamed of having the treads and risers get cut and placed. Screws are needed to tighten out warping, the harvested oak is stubborn. It’s still alive.

Finally the old oak is used up and the stairs are only 2/3 finished. The rest of the matching oak will be store bought — perfect, smooth, straight and unflawed. The staircase is finished and can be gazed upon. The store bought wood is perfect and without blemish. The old harvested oak shows it years of varied weather, some rings thin from drought some thicker from a rainy moderate year. It has more knots from limbs broken by storms and winds. It bears the scars, wounds, imperfections and variations of the vicissitudes of life.

Before the polyurethane which will enlighten and dramatize the wood goes on a startle comes into your psyche like a bolt of lightning. The imperfect, the local harvested wood that suffered the joys and pains of a life in the real woods, has the greater character and beauty. A mesmerizing variety of stories and experiences including its birth in softer ground close to a seasonal stream that was both a blessing and its demise. The old imperfect wood is the glory of the new stairs, the story of wonder and enchantment of the struggle. In that moment there will only be the sound of your own heart and the only movement your fleeting breath.