The Woods

It's Tuesday. I have three things due Monday, none of them small. I spent my lunch with a lemon tree.

I want to be careful how I describe that, because it wasn't rest. My mind doesn't shut off when I step away from the desk. It does what it always does, which is try to organize chaos. It just had nothing assigned to it for once, so it went looking, and what it found was a tree.

Six weeks ago I wrote you from my desk on the Friday of a holiday weekend, while my family was at the pool, to say I'd spent two years building the systems that were supposed to hand me that afternoon and had sat at the desk anyway. I ended it by saying I was going to close the laptop. This isn't the letter where I tell you I fixed it. It's the letter about what my head did once it finally had room.

---

My dad knew every tree in the woods

Not in a naturalist way. He knew them because he was cutting them. For a living, for heat, for whatever the situation called for, and usually all of it at once. Which one splits clean. Which one will rot on you. Which one burns hot and which one just makes smoke.

That knowledge was earned with a saw, over years, and none of it was ever written down.

He had an elementary education. He could read the woods better than anybody I've known. Words were a different thing. I'm not going to make more of that than it is. I'll just say that when knowledge like his doesn't get captured, it isn't always because nobody asked.

He's gone now, and it went with him.

I've spent two years working on that exact problem inside other people's businesses. The guy who knows which machine to trust. The one who can hear a bad bearing from across the building. The scheduler carrying the whole week in his head who is right about it. Every shop has one. Every owner knows what happens the day he retires. Almost nobody does anything about it until it has already happened.

And when I build something to catch what's in a man's head, I build it around how he actually works instead of how a system wishes he would. I didn't get that from a case study.

---

My twin brother makes bows

Mike works in bodark. Same woods our dad cut.

What he makes is beautiful, and I don't mean that the way you say it about a relative's hobby. The things are genuinely, irritatingly good. They also work, which is the harder half. A bow is not decor. It either bends right or it breaks, and a beautiful one that breaks is expensive kindling.

He does it by hand. No power tools. The way it has been done here a very long time. I'm not going to describe his process, because he would correct me and he would be right.

He takes the wood out and makes something old out of it, and he is better at it than I will ever be at anything I do with a tree.

---

I'm doing a third thing with the same trees

My neighbor has bodark on his property. He's going to bring me hedge apples, and maybe a sapling. So I'll be putting bodark seeds in dirt in my backyard while Mike is out looking for a stave big enough to build something from. Same wood, opposite ends of it. He's finishing a tree. I'm starting one.

I pulled a sycamore out of a quarry. Nobody planted it. It came up on its own in ground that had already been dug out, and it was going to get scraped off eventually, and now it's in a pot at my house. There's a bald cypress on order.

None of it gets cut down. None of it gets made into anything. The whole job is that it's still alive next year, and that eventually it looks like something.

Three of us. The same woods. Necessity, craft, preservation.

You only get to the third one when the first one isn't the whole job anymore.

---

Five years of fruit

Her name is Lemangela. It's a bad pun. Lemon and Angela, and Angela is my wife.

Angie will tell you I named a tree after her and then mostly ignored it for five years, and Angie would be right.

I've had that tree since it was a seedling. This is its first year bearing fruit, and that is most of what I had ever noticed about it. That, and the thorns. Five years, and the honest inventory is that I had looked at the part that sticks you and the part you harvest.

Once I got interested in keeping trees alive, I looked again and understood it had been neglected the entire time. So today I gave it a light pruning, and when I stepped back I saw the trunk for the first time.

Five years. I had never once looked at the trunk.

Thorns and fruit are both outputs. They are what the tree hands you, the thing that hurts and the thing that pays, and they present themselves whether you're paying attention or not. The trunk is the structure that produced both, and it doesn't present itself at all. You have to go looking. And you generally don't go looking until you've decided you care whether the thing is still standing in ten years.

I don't think I need to explain what that is to anybody who has run a shop off a dashboard.

---

The part I didn't expect

Here's what I actually want to tell you, and it isn't about the lunch.

I have a hobby.

I hadn't had one in a very long time. Long enough that I'd stopped noticing it was gone, which is how that goes. You don't feel the absence. You quit being a person who has one, and years pass, and nothing on your calendar ever tells you.

I told you at the top that my mind is always trying to organize chaos. That isn't a virtue, it's just the machine I've got, and for most of my career I aimed it at somebody else's. Eighteen years organizing a business that wasn't mine, and the thanks for it was a door.

So I went out on my own and pointed the same machine at my own operation, which turned out to be its own kind of trap. Where things were, what was owed, what I'd forgotten, who was waiting on me. It never ran out of material, because I was the material.

That's the part that got solved. Not the workload. The chaos.

And an organizing mind with nothing left to organize doesn't go quiet. It goes looking. Mine went out in the yard and found five years of neglect on a lemon tree, a sycamore that needed pulling out of a quarry, and a whole set of woods I'd been walking past since I was a kid.

Same machine. Better material. Fruitful, even.

That's what the rebuild bought. Not an hour on a Tuesday. A whole part of my life that had been shut, and what turned out to be behind it was my dad's woods.

---

Monday hasn't happened yet

I don't know that it goes fine. Three deadlines is three deadlines and any one of them can turn on me. I'm not writing from the far side of anything.

I'm telling you the motor is here, for your shop and for mine, and that what you rebuild around it is the whole question. If your answer is only more, you've bolted it to the old layout and you'll spend a few years wondering why it isn't paying.

Six weeks ago I wrote that there was a pool and I wasn't at it. Angela was.

The tree I named for her bore fruit this year, and this time I was standing there when it happened.