Fresh Cuts

November, 2011

After the storm, after power was restored, after the children were back in school and the husbands back at work, still the chainsaws droned for weeks, the air laced with a sawdust haze, as the work of removing thousands of fallen trees continued. Daily I was dazzled by the sight of so many trees rent apart, so many raw trunks, oozing sap, the exposed wood the hues of mushroom and egg yolk with streaks of charcoal, rust, chocolate, the demarcations of earlywood and latewood, the cornmeal sapwood, the burnt umber heartwood, the punctuating pith in the centers, and the centuries-old trees hiding for so long the secrets of their hollowed centers where for decades caverns quietly opened, supplanting the rotted heartwood—so many narratives of lives laid bare in rings and cavities, so much grain glaring, asking to be read, so much suddenly revealed to the eye that is normally hidden, internal.

On one such grain-filled post-storm morning I take my son to preschool, my mind so full of wood that I begin to read the grain of that day, trying to catch, in the weak autumn sunlight, the contours of its rings, but the cut is so fresh, the wood so commonplace and unremarkable, that it seems indistinguishable from all the other preschool mornings. Over time I know that the grain will grow more pronounced, darker, with a patina on the surface from the rubbing of hands, the rubbing of memory. What is merely today will then seem quaint, a relic, history: what we talked about, what we wore, what technologies we carried on our bodies, what crusades we were on, what toys we offered our children, what cars we drove, which five-point harnesses we secured our babies with, who we thought we were, what we made of our world. And also: how our minds were narrow and ignorant, what qualities we had in abundance, what qualities we lacked, which parts of our lives will become outdated, antediluvian, what kinds of new whorls and knots and kinks of structure hindsight will bring out, what kinds of innocence we brimmed with back before X and Y calamity occurred in the world, back then when we were all still living, back before the children, born and unborn, became the adults and usurped us and looked back at us with pity or disdain or envy or nostalgia. This is the raw wood of this day, my mind just wide enough to glimpse the surface of this new cut, and to see that every dawn is freshly cut wood exposed for the first time to light.

Walnut Box

He scrutinized the boards, choosing from half-inch-thick walnut planks. He was looking for interesting figure, for something beautiful, though it’s difficult to see wood’s full potential when it’s rough cut. His selection made, he fed the boards into a planer, passing them through three of four times per side, making minor adjustments between each pass. Then he finished one edge, passing the board through a jointer two or three times. He measured and marked his cuts with chalk, avoiding a loose knothole, inspecting the grain and anticipating the ways the wood might change, the cupping or bowing, the potential warping. Then he waited to give the wood time to move.

The following week, he planed and jointed the board again to attain the final thickness of 3/8”. Using a table saw, he cut the wood into five pieces. Securing each of the pieces on a workbench with bench dogs, he used a scraper to smooth the surface of the wood, shaving tiny curls all the way across the board in one continuous motion, producing a silky finished surface.

Next, he traced two arcs, large and small, onto a piece of pine. Using a router, he cut the curves onto the pine board, creating a template. He transferred the curves from the template to the walnut side pieces, creating gentle elliptical curves at the bottom of the box. Then he drew a curve on the lid of the box and shaped it with the router. In the corners of the lid he cut four knock-outs where the legs would fit. Using a small plane, he chamfered the edges of the lid. On the inside of the box’s sides, he made a slot with the table saw where the bottom of the box would be inset. On the two shorter sides, he added another slot for a small piece of wood that would support the tray.  

For the legs, he took a piece of 1x1” walnut stock, finished it, and cut it in half. Using a table saw with the blade set to 45 degrees, he chamfered all four ends of the two pieces. With a plunge router he made grooves on two adjacent sides of the leg pieces. Then he cut the two pieces in half, making four legs. Using a chisel, he made tongues in the edges of the side pieces that matched the grooves in the legs. In the rear legs he drilled small holes that would hold the lid pins. The bottom of the box he cut from a piece of aspen plywood, making small knock-outs for the legs.

Once the pieces were ready, he built the box dry, without glue, to see how it would fit together. The finished dimensions were approximately 20x8x4”. When the pieces fit well, he began gluing the case together, putting glue in the grooves and carefully working in the tongues. After attaching the short sides to the legs, he waited a week for the glue to dry. Then he glued the long sides to the legs, fit the bottom into its slot, and assembled the case.

While the case dried, he built the tray. Again, he selected and milled the wood. After cutting it into five pieces for the tray’s bottom and four sides, he cut a groove in the side pieces into which the bottom would fit securely. Then he made half-lap joints on the corners of the box, using contrasting birch-wood the diameter of a toothpick to pin the corners together. He glued the tray and let it dry.

He applied three coats of polyurethane to the case, lid, and tray, sanding between each application. To the lid and the inside of the drawer, he applied two extra coats. When the finish was dry, he secured the lid with brass pins, attached the brass chain, and inserted the tray. The box was finished.

And then he gave it to me for twelve years of marriage.