The stump of the biggest cedar measured more than three feet across. The guys had cut it level, using their huge saws as skillfully as cabinetmakers, so I could put a large planter on top.

House in Spring
BY John Pass

The mill came, pulled by a pickup truck held together with wire. The owner of both had been recommended by several sources — but always with the proviso not to get downwind of him. He had just been in hospital to have a steel rod inserted alongside his spine (can this really be possible?) so he’d reluctantly brought a helper, a staggering fellow missing several fingers. His job was to carry the enormous lengths of cedar log to the mill where they would be sliced into boards.

The smell that day was not, as feared, of the owner’s odour (though it could easily be detected when I passed him coffee on their morning break, something extraordinary, like animal fat and mysterious unwashed corners of the body and clothing steeped in both wood and tobacco smoke), but of the spicy scent of fresh-sawn cedar. The boards were beautiful as they emerged from the end of the mill — pink and salmon, the grain an intricate story of age and weather. Several times I was horrified to see the owner lifting logs himself and imagined an emergency, the ambulance negotiating our rough driveway, paramedics removing that ripe body from the ground with a metal spike exposed at the back of his neck.

And I decided that the true magic was in the finding. That hidden in the heart of a tree was unexpected treasure, a mnemonic to take us back to our beginning days on this property, when our garden grew beyond us…

The pile of lumber grew — the beam, some 2 x 10s, 2 x 8s (these were full dimensions as the boards were not planed), some planks which began as one dimension but then tapered as the logs narrowed. I could see them as benches or tables, balanced on stumps. I kept touching the boards. Their surfaces were damp, the inner mysteries of the wood released to light. On one chunk of wood, hardly a board, the grain formed an eye, elongated and ovoid — a god or a raven staring out. When I smelled my hands afterwards, the incense lingered, at once familiar and sibylline.

I was inside, doing some task in the kitchen, when John came in with his fist closed over something. What, though? Too early in the year for tree frogs, too early for an unexpected gift of raspberries brought dewy from the garden on a July morning, their tang on the tongue a promise and memory of every summer.

He opened his hand. Five seeds. His eyes shone. “They were inside an area of rot I was prodding at with a screwdriver in one of the big planks.”

“Show me.”

So we went outside to look at the board, its open hole where the rot had been crumbled out with the screwdriver, a few of the cubes of diseased wood on the ground beside it. By a little bit of deduction, we realized the board had been come from the inner section of the lower trunk and when we went to the remaining stump, we saw the corresponding section of rot right at the tree’s old heart. It looked like something called “brown cubical rot” which forms a seam up the centre of the butt. It’s introduced by the mycelia of a fungus that grows on the trunk. When we first came to this land, in 1980, the tree was young and stringy. I don’t remember a wound where rot could have begun or a shelf of bright fungus, but given that we were building a house and raising three small children, there was a lot I didn’t notice in the course of my days. I do remember that, in later years, there was a cicatrice low on the trunk where the bark had healed. It was a popular tree with squirrels.