<\/p>\n
I worked it out, and I had to set the knife down, because it was a brass plate about the size of a playing card, and the engraving on it read: FROM THE BURR OAK AT THE HOME PLACE, MADISON ROAD \u2014 TAKEN DOWN MARCH 2024 \u2014 FOR JANET.<\/p>\n
My tree.<\/p>\n
There was a burr oak in the side yard of the farm I grew up on, big enough that three of us couldn\u2019t reach around it, and there was a rope swing in it, and my father is buried about four hundred yards from it. We sold that place in 2009 when my mother went into care and I have not driven past it since, because I am a coward about certain things.<\/p>\n
The people who bought it took that oak down in March of last year. It had rot in the crotch and a limb came down on their barn and there wasn\u2019t any choice about it, and I did not know one thing about any of it.<\/p>\n
Gene knew. He\u2019d been driving past that place for years without telling me, the way he\u2019d drive past and check on things.<\/p>\n
In the gap under that plate was the rest of it, folded down small. A ticket from a portable sawmill outfit out of Sabina, dated the ninth of April, one log, burr oak, quarter-sawn, and a kiln receipt from June, and a note in the margin from the sawyer saying it was the prettiest oak he\u2019d cut all year.<\/p>\n
He asked those people for the log. A stranger\u2019s yard, a man he\u2019d never met, and he asked if he could have the trunk of a tree that had not been ours in sixteen years, and they gave it to him, and he hauled it to a sawmill and paid to have it cut and dried and then he made me a cutting board out of it.<\/p>\n
His note was under the sawmill ticket.<\/p>\n
Janet \u2014 there\u2019s enough of that oak in the shop for a table someday if I get to it. The plate goes on the board once you\u2019ve used it enough to earn the oil into it. That\u2019s why I hid it. If I\u2019d handed it to you with the plate on already, you\u2019d have hung the thing on a wall and never cut on it, and a tree doesn\u2019t want to be a picture. Use it hard, and one day it\u2019ll give you something back. \u2014 G.<\/em><\/p>\n A tree doesn\u2019t want to be a picture.<\/p>\n I leaned that board against the backsplash and let him see I was hurt over a miter saw and a piece of scrap. Two weeks later his heart went out in that shop and I could not reach him in time, and for eleven months I used every other board in the drawer and never his.<\/p>\n The oak is out there. Six slabs on the rack in his shop, stickered and stacked the way he\u2019d have wanted, and our son-in-law says he can make the table if I\u2019ll help him.<\/p>\n The plate is screwed into the end of that board now. I cut on it every day and it has a groove worn in it already, and the oil is going into it the way he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I worked it out, and I had to set the knife down, because it was a brass plate about the size of a playing card, and the engraving on … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4031,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-new-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/senglee168.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4030","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/senglee168.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/senglee168.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/senglee168.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/senglee168.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4030"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/senglee168.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4030\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4032,"href":"https:\/\/senglee168.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4030\/revisions\/4032"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/senglee168.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/senglee168.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/senglee168.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/senglee168.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}