Making choices and living with the consequences

Filling in the cracks | Birthday | Consequences

Hello and a long-ish update: I’ve been working on filling cracks and grooves with slivers of Maple.

This is for a serving board I made. The work itself could either feel tedious or engaging, depending on one’s perspective, patience, and fine motor skills. Personally, I find it deeply satisfying to create the perfect sliver for a given space. But maybe I just have a soulfully tedious nature.

It kinds of looks like a pair of wide-set eyes with a raised eyebrow, no?

This past week I also celebrated my birthday with a delightful message from my youngest child.

I’ll translate the writing for you here, in case reading scrawled crayon messages isn’t something you’ve had to do in awhile:

“Dear Mom,

I hope thou has a happyiest of birthdays. It will be my plesure to attennd. The party must be set for a feast. The preasents shall be stacked high. The food, oh, how delicose.

Sincerly,

Madam Opal”

In that spirit, I hope thou has the happyiest of weeks, with many a feast of remarkable quality, scintillating fanfare and conversation to delight the wit and inspire the mind.

My essay is below ❤️

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The paths of our decisions

(Mea culpa—I have completely run out of time to record this essay!)

I’m preparing for an artisan market in November by making a variety of items that will hopefully be of interest and easy to transport, display, and sell. One example of which is the charcuterie/serving board above.

Josiah, my partner and long-time scourge of the squirrels that live around our house¹, suggested I make smaller sized charcuterie boards, as people seem to like the big ones I’ve made and smaller ones might be more accessible to a wider range of customers.

There are some projects that you can find the wood you want and shape it to your needs. The side tables I made, for example, required several boards of Cherry that were straight-edged and glued up and then shaped into tops, legs, and aprons. Easy.

Then there are those projects that you have to stumble upon the right material. I can’t force the shape of the charcuterie boards; they are in response to weirdly shaped pieces of wood that beckon to be appreciated as they are. They require attention, but it’s less about the outcome I want and more about what they are willing to become.

Last year, Dad came across a Black Walnut branch and cut it into about eight slices. They are each around 12–15” long, about 8–10” wide, and maybe around an inch or so thick. Oval shaped with natural edges and knots and cracks.

Josiah and my youngest child think that last one with the inlay looks like a face.

He showed them to me and asked if I wanted them. Which of course I did, because I’m a greedy little raccoon. We thought they might crack and so decided to put anchor seal on them.

Anchor seal is goop that can be applied to the ends of a log that has just been cut to help keep a log from cracking and splitting as it dries. All wood is full of water and the drying process can cause lots of cracks in the wood (once cut into lumber, it can also cause the boards to twist and warp, which is why they should be tied and weighted down during the drying process).

Those slices sat in the barn (which has basically been converted to a wood-storage unit) for probably well over a year, until Josiah mentioned the mini charcoots idea and they came to mind.

Over the past year, I’ve thought about what I could make with those slices. I turned one into a jewelry board. Thought about making them into clocks. And then, reckoning with the deadline that the artisan market imposes, and the fact that I have limited funds to buy more materials (such as what would be needed to make clocks), I realized they would be just the right size for small food serving platters.

So Dad and I brought them to the work bench and began removing the anchor seal. Normally, when the anchor seal is at the end of a log, you can easily whack off the end of the board (or even the log).

Unfortunately, that option wasn’t open. We didn’t want to plane the slices, as the seal would gum up the planer blades. So we created a multi-step process that included scraping it off with a chisel, sanding it with 50-grit paper on a belt sander, then hitting it with 80-grit paper on the orbital sander.

I realize these photos make it look like my dad is doing all the work, but that's only because I can't scrape wood and take photos at the same time.

About 15 minutes into the scraping routine, my thought was, “f&*# anchor seal.” Followed by a sigh.

As if I could blame the current tedious work on some external actor. But the anchor seal didn’t apply itself to these wood slices. I did that.

When work gets frustrating, it’s easy to want to blame some other actor for the annoyances now obscuring the path forward.

And would things have been so much better without this onerous task? If not this activity, what? Is sanding or shaping with a rasp or meticulously carving slivers of Maple by hand to fit the exact specifications of a minute crack not onerous?

I remember as a child watching the adults around me and thinking that I’d not make their mistakes when I grew up. Quixotic choices in adulthood have been letting that inner child down ever since.

I’m a master at making unfortunate choices. Small ones. Painful ones. Life-changing ones. Pen and paper ones.

And sometimes the choices that make sense at one point in time don’t hold up over the long run. A “good” choice morphs into a “bad” or “unfortunate” or “pain-in-the-ass” choice a year later.

Saving the Black Walnut slices from the burn pile was a good choice because it brought the right kind of weird material into my life when I needed it. Coating the sides in anchor seal could also be seen as a good choice because it kept the boards from cracking so bad that they became unusable. (I’m not experienced enough to know if they would’ve cracked if left to dry without it.) But a year later, that same good choice felt not so great.

Dad once told me that even when you make a good decision, you still have to live with the consequences. Being the simple person I am, I railed against that. I wanted my good choices to be directly followed by goodness.

As I was cursing the anchor seal, I thought about his comment. Perhaps it is time for me to let go of my simple notions of “good” and “bad” as it applies to tasks in woodworking. Perhaps there is a third way, a nuanced gray area in between, in which the choices are the best they can be with the knowledge currently within my possession, and when I know better, I’ll do better.

At least that feels like a doable plan for now.

1. I realize many of you probably know who Josiah is, as he gets mentioned frequently. But it amuses me to come up with new ways to describe him each time he makes an appearance here. Kind of like how I mow the lawn—each time, I try to find a new route. Josiah shudders at the thought of changing the way something is done. He feels that if it works, why make any alterations? (I just nodded off in boredom writing that sentence.)