Summer Recovery Moon
Jon and I went to Paxton Lumber Company yesterday, checking out exotic and not-so-exotic woods for material to extend the surface of the shorter shelving units. A couple of the ones I really liked were $20 and $19 a board foot, padauk and wenge. At those prices one board, thick, was in the $300 range. After looking at ash, white pine, and douglas fir, all of which I liked but were too close to the birch veneer on the bookshelves, we settled on black walnut.
Not only will the black walnut contrast with the birch veneer, black walnut trees were common in my hometown of Alexandria, Indiana. I have fond memories of stepping on the green acrid smelling husks of walnuts as they fell from those trees. We teased out the walnuts tucked inside and took them home, fingers stained with a greenish-yellow paste that had a bitter lemony taste. A part of my childhood. Also, black walnut trees were part of the old forest which dominated the landscape of the midwest prior to westward expansion. So those boards of the midwest will rest on birch veneer, redolent of the boreal forest in Minnesota. But the bookcases they constitute reside here on Shadow Mountain among lodgepole and ponderosa pines.
We ate lunch at Park Burger in the Hilltop neighborhood of Denver, a wealthy area with tear-down lots filled now with house reminiscent of Kenwood in Minneapolis. I had a Scarpone burger with pancetta, provolone and giardiniera. It was delicious.
Jon’s skills as a woodworker were evident as we selected the particular walnut boards. We matched their color, thickness and rejected some with too deep fissures or splits. He knows the woods and their characteristics. He also knows the places where exacting cuts can be made, straight. One place has a table saw as large as a small room.
Once again the joy of returning home from Denver’s 94 degrees to Shadow Mountain’s 77 with 23% humidity. The nights have been warm of late, making sleeping more difficult and pushing those ceiling fan purchases higher up on our priority list.
