A few years ago, our daughter Amy and her husband David noticed that the mature, perfectly formed maple tree that shaded their back yard began to lose its uppermost leaves a bit earlier than the rest of the tree. Soon they saw squirrels eating the bark from the upper branches. Year after year more branches gave up the ghost and pretty soon the beautiful tree was dead. Insects began infesting the branches, and woodpeckers began making holes in them to find the insects. Branches began rotting and falling into the yard. David felled the tree and cut off the lyrically curving branches, tying some of them with jute cord into hemispherical frames in which the girls could play. Others were piled in the woods behind the yard to continue their decomposition. I looked at the gray log, the marvelous, straight, giant of it, and thought of the lumber that was in it. “It’s rotten,” David said. “It’s spalted,” I replied; “Let me know if you want to get rid of it.” Finally after several weeks of working around the monster log commanding their back yard, David said I could do what I wanted with it.
The next morning I was in their yard studying the tree when I heard Jim coming down the road, his rusty old truck pulling the trailer-mounted sawmill. My friend had told me about him, a quiet old man who was nothing but muscle and bone and knowledge about trees and how to mill them. He was on the short side, thin and gray. He looked as worn out as the tree. As we worked, I asked him about his life, and he told me about land, and trees, and turning them into lumber that he could sell. He lived, it seemed, off the land that he had been on since his youth, doing what his dad had done before him. I thought of him as an extension of the forest.
Though the first two hours, the log was cut into workable lengths, and those logs were dragged behind my Subaru through the woods, around the house, into the driveway to the mill. As Jim guided the mill through the logs, their rotten, gray exterior peeled away and exposed the rich, bright grain and hues of the hard maple, embellished by nature’s paintbrush, the spalting caused by moisture following the trails if the infesting insects, the chemical and biological changes turning colors, bleaching random sections and bordering them with deep purple. It turns out that that old rotten tree, gray and lined with cracks opened into stacks of beautiful planks, alive with color and substance and promise.
Amy brought the girls from music lessons, David came home from work, and we all took a break for lunch. We got to know Jim. It turns out that he was much more than he appeared. It turns out that he was a substitute teacher, loving especially the young kids, kindergarten and the primary grades, full of wonder and hunger for learning. It turns out that he doesn’t sub as much as he used to when it was the people who knew how much the kids love him would call him when a teacher was needed, because now it’s all done by computer, and Jim is off the power grid, living off the land and needing to take his laptop to the place he has his morning coffee to plug it in and access the internet to check for substitute teacher needs, and they’ve usually been taken by someone who can log in from their bed and snatch them up. It turns out that he’s a voracious reader, with a mind bright and active like the colors in that tree, colors and patterns that we could never imagine, looking at the grey wornness of it.
By mid afternoon, Jim was gone and the driveway was piled with treasure. The worn, gray man and the worn gray log had turned out to be so surprisingly and delightfully beautiful inside, overflowing and abundant. We were left with so much more than we had anticipated, plenty to share.
FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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