My Mistress Is A Tree

I know this is a strange thing to admit, but I am a lover of trees. My wife is okay with me sharing my affections with these beautiful deciduous and coniferous friends, and she never seems to be threatened if I sneak out at night for a walk in the woods with my other love.

I do not fit into the category of a tree hugger, although I have been known to wrap my arms around a few of them when no one is looking, In fact a few dozen years ago my neighbors were about to summon the local arbor police when they saw me out in my back yard beating a few trees with a baseball bat. Lest you too think I am crazy, I read that if a tree is dying, then sometimes you can beat the outside bark with a bat, which apparently stimulates the tree to suck up more water and sometimes they recover. The beaten trees actually leafed out for several more years before they finally succumbed to the fact that I had dumped three feet of soil over their roots. I apologized to them when I realized the error of my ways, but by that time they were in no mood to listen.

This love affair with another life form began forty years ago when an old landlord gave me a dirt covered slice off of a tree he had cut down a few years earlier. "Try making something from this" he suggested, and my first thought was a fire. Up until that time I had done some wood-working using pine boards purchased from a lumberyard, but there is little connection to a tree when you sort through lengths of precut, planed lumber in the back corner of the 1970's version of a Home Depot

This gift of an outside slice from a two hundred year old walnut tree was different. And since the "try... this" suggestion was issued as a challenge by a man who thought he was superior to everyone, I started the process of proving to him that I had some skills in the art of crafting something useful from a tree.

I will admit to more than a little of second guessing my personal wisdom in having accepted this challenge as I scraped the mud, spiders, and several years of other barnyard crud from the surface of this wooden slab. But it was in that endeavor where I fell in love once again just a few months after I married my wife.

In just a few hours of cleaning, hand planing, and then sanding, I had uncovered the incredible beauty hidden inside a walnut tree. Hand rubbed boiled linseed oil took it's natural inner beauty to the level of a goddess when exposed to the warm muted light of a late afternoon sun.

Love can be described as the feeling you get when your physical and emotional senses become saturated, and as I stared at the swirling grain of the heartwood in that tree, perfection interrupted several times by an intense black color where the cells had been seared from a decades earlier lightning strike, there is no doubt I was once again in love.

For more than a dozen years I maintained this clandestine relationship, and every year I would sneak down to the basement workshop sometime in October to craft a piece of furniture for my wife's Christmas present. Coffee table, butler's table, corner cabinet, bell cabinet, wall sconces, cabinets in a plant room: all were hand crafted from the wood of walnut trees. I made a curio cabinet using oak one year, and whenever I look at it I always wonder why I strayed.

My first love, my wife, has never turned on me even though I have given her many reasons to do so, but my other love, after ten years together, exposed a side of her I never knew, and I became hyper-allergic to her poison. Fine cut shavings and dust from a walnut tree can kill a horse, but my reaction was different, I became intensely angry whenever she was cut in my presence, her poison somehow affecting my central nervous system.

My wife put an end to this affair when she realized what was happening, and for several decades I stayed away, momentarily tempted when a fine furniture catalog would arrive at our door with some exquisitely crafted piece made from solid walnut.

Every few years i would sneak down to the basement and craft something, but the first time I forgot to wear a mask my walnut goddess's venom would penetrate my skin and cause a severe neurological reaction. I know I needed to end the relationship, so I switched to using cherry for some furniture pieces: A nice wood, in fact a beautiful wood but one that when I look at her, she elicits feelings of friendship and not love.

I have remained on the straight and narrow for many years now, but several months ago I stopped in a new store that opened up in a warehouse a few miles from home. Local Woods was the name of the store, and I should have turned and walked away, but I did not. There in the front of the store stood my old love, majestic in her raw state, waiting for the sculptor to bring out all the beauty from within.

These boards in the photo below are now in my garage, calling to me everyday. And as each day passes, I am drawn tighter into her poison laden web.