Playing Fair and Being Kind

I picked up a book that I’d read a million years ago. I sat in my chair with the local classical music station turned on and settled in. That lasted about two minutes; the words on the page stirred my juice so; a froth of ideas poured forth. My mind raced to keep up and lost pace quickly. I leapt from the chair and grabbed a notebook and pencil. Here it is.

PREMISE

Sitting in the large overstuffed chair – commanding the fabric to yield to his slender body – mating skin and robe and velour with heat – the elder sank luxuriously into a posture of surprising and total comfort. A cup of hot coffee at hand, violin strings filling his head and heart, reminding him of lovers long gone, he moved the pen across the page –
The pen pressed against the old table before him. A relic salvaged from an ignominious existence under burdensome detritus usually found in graveyards of forgotten, discarded furnishings in moldy barns. Pine boards nailed, not fit and glued, to rails of repurposed freight pallets and turned legs acquired through surreptitious, unremarkable means.
He sips from the cup and corrals the words and phrases into strings of ideas and thoughts to form dark, imaginative pictures that burst open in the minds of readers. The scribe’s pen moves steadily along lines of blue; pressed into the table top boards that, until recently, had lived in a tall white-pine with giant, heavy limbs that pumped wet sap and nutrients a hundred feet from deep, thick roots to the quintets of green needles that form the crown in the far-away top branches where glistening diamonds catch the sun’s bright rays; small universes of aromatic pitch clinging to stiff needles high above the forest floor.
A lightning strike during an early summer storm split the tree apart ending that romantic scene. The lumber was gathered, sorted, and distributed to users accordingly. The largest limbs and trunk were clamped and bound with chains and binders to iron stanchions of the logging truck that hauled the load to the mill for sawing. The lesser limbs and branches were fed into a chipper to be piled, stored, bagged and later spread as mulch to be organically joined in molecular form; to be new products of flower gardens, raised beds of vegetables for raiding rabbits, or possibly combined through other organic means to be incorporated into red oaks standing by the water, clinging to shallow soil on granite ledges.
In the case of this crude but simple writing surface, the tree trunk was run through a large saw. It became four quarter, six quarter, two-inch rough sawn boards stacked, stickered, and air dried for several years in a large lot in Back Narrows next to the Damariscotta River. One four quarter board eventually made its way to the capable hands of a sometimes-wood worker who handled the board lovingly. That board quickly became smoothed and shaped and formed into a rugged low table upon which this tale is told.
G. M. Goodwin
October 22, 2019