A slab becomes a charcuterie board

On creations that will never shine as brightly in reality as they do in imagination.

Happy September!

A couple of updates: I’m still setting things up for my business, part of which includes moving this newsletter over to Substack. So here we are!

In woodworking, my main summer project was responding to a request from my children to turn their beds into lofts, which I did. As soon as we had my oldest child’s new loft bed assembled, my youngest took a look and said, Nope. That’s too high for me. So I got to learn the art of digging out pocket hole screws and pulling apart glued-up joints that would’ve preferred to stay together. But come apart they did and now the second loft is a foot shorter than the first. Everybody wins.

And Dad and I made a charcuterie board. More about that in the essay below.

Thank you for reading!

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A heavy, hulking end slab of Black Walnut now sits polished and loved in our kitchen, transformed into a charcuterie board, a prototype of a future gift that I’ll be making later this fall. It featured twice during the long weekend when we had company over, and now boasts tomato juice stains and the aural ring from a sweating glass.

A few weeks ago, it was covered in sawdust keeping company with other oddly shaped scraps next to Dad’s sawmill. That pile, taking up about the space of a queen-sized mattress, filled with myriad species of Minnesota hard wood, some long and leaning against the sheet metal wall, others small and buried in the mix, all of them dusty from the sawmill’s work—that pile is quickly becoming one of my favorite places on this earth. Put me next to it and I’m like a greedy raccoon, inquisitive fingers itching to search through and uncover the possibilities.  

Dad builds cabinetry—think arts and crafts style kitchen cabinets, built-in bookshelves, side tables, and the like. He’d never made a charcuterie board before and neither had I. Making this was a learning experience for us both, which is one of the best parts of woodworking. You can spend years at it, develop a high level of skill and expertise, yet there is always more to learn and try.

The idea for the board came from my sister, who wondered if, when I was picking through all those delightful scraps, I could keep an eye out for a visually interesting piece that might make a nice board. We talked about the features she wanted and I thought to myself, how hard could that be?

More attempts than not to make something beautiful (and useful) fail to become reality in my work. It takes twin skills that some days I simply lack: a seeing-within-seeing ability and patient confidence. Sometimes I can easily imagine what a piece of wood could become, holding both what is and what could be simultaneously, being realistic about the former and optimistic about the latter.

However, as much as I want a project to turn out just as I’ve imagined it, such control has to be surrendered during the process. Nothing I create in the real world will be as wonderful as that which resides exclusively in my mind.

“Any attempt to bring our ideas into concrete reality must inevitably fall short of our dreams, no matter how brilliantly we succeed in carrying things off—because reality, unlike fantasy, is a realm in which we don’t have limitless control, and can’t hope to meet our perfectionist standards,” writes Oliver Burkeman in his book Four Thousand Weeks.

This excerpt is from his chapter, “On Perfection and Paralysis,” and it put words to so many of the little demons that have and often still bedevil me.

I was waiting to be a woodworker until I had the time.

Waiting until I had more equipment.

Til I could take a class or learn from someone more experienced.

Waiting to make a business until I had more skill.

To write until I could shape my words better.

Waiting.

“Fixing to do,” as my family would say, instead of just doing, however imperfectly and messily the result. However much it would hurt to fall short of my own expectations.

“Since every real-world choice about how to live entails the loss of countless alternative ways of living, there’s no reason to procrastinate, or to resist making commitments, in the anxious hope that you might somehow be able to avoid those losses,” Burkeman writes. “Loss is a given. That ship has sailed—and what a relief.”

So we took the slab, roughly planed on both sides with bark on the back and a five-inch knot running through, and cleaned it up. Scraped all the bark off, smoothed out each side creating a flat surface, removed all the material in the knot. Using a router, we cleared out the wood in the middle of the board, making a 3/4” deep center with a 1/2” lip just about all around.

Overall this prototype turned out well. However, holding the reality in my hands, I can tick off the places where it falls short of my imagination.

Yet it is brought to life, and through it I see more clearly that the desire for absolute control will only ever be a limiting force in my work—a screw-tightening rigidity that would break me before ever granting creative grace.

No more waiting. Just accepting the loss that was only imaginary to begin with, and moving on, twitchy raccoon fingers ready to sift through the pile for the next project.

I’d love to hear from you. If you want to hear more from me, you can find other essays on my website.