Tracing the grain ...

There can be an insistence to feel, and it blunts with waiting. 

I know and love the touch of a keen edge, tested by drawing forefinger across and notice how well it grabs at the lines, fingerprint, of my skin, as shown to me by a long dead mentor, a widely admired Boatwright and example of humanity. 


To pare cleanly across grain, no tearing, and lift the finest of shaves, or plane it smooth and straight matter what the tortured confusion of some woods growth, tangled interlock .... life's terrain. To be challenged, i know i want to learn that grain and work with it, find the beauty it holds, run my exploring fingers and hear its story.

Not all wood is as challenging, some is so clean and straight, will not trouble by warping and cupping and will stay true. You can build with this, have confidence it will serve as a king-post and endure, and attach all else securely, step your mast through it .... Yes, there is a place for that too, and its much more rewarding to the novice to feel confident with it.

I did something (or nothing) at the weekend, after some paddling in the 'forgotten' shallows of childhood memory. I went back to the village where i lived between 5 and 11 years old. The small river was in flood. This is where i once taught myself to row a neighbours dinghy, and dared to ease her backwards, so the stern was precariously on the very edge of the sluice, delicately kept there with my precise dips of oar, my younger siblings trusting me blindly (or sharing the thrill?), to not be drawn over and plunge into thundering foam.

I then strolled, found the huge 'Grandad' willow tree arched right over the river, where i once spent hours, just mesmerised by the flowing water and dipped branches, trailing patterns without end. "Going down the river" was all i used to tell mum, so many times. Cows would sometimes wade in, spoiling the illusion of depths, when the Hawthorn bloomed in close grazed pasture, and the world was all in that valley, between the railway, and the distant rise in the west.

Now, it all looked so small, and aged. Our once freshly built home now looks like a 'retiree's', covered in lichen of generations. 


But the Willow tree still stands so tall, has grown, like me, furrowed and reaching, always..... to the stream.