8.15.2025

We're on a mission to pick up wood. The doctor has built a contraption to place on top of the car. The contraption is also made of wood and its purpose is to carry other wood. They need a lot of wood around here. It's not like the North where I was for a while, where you just wait for a storm and a hundred year maple comes down so you can chainsaw it up for wood-burning or -building needs. This requires planning. It's always good to know a guy on top of that. The wood store smells of pine and baltic birch. I know that without reading the signs, which isn't true. I do know walnut when I see it, and oak, and some endangered trees like ash and elm. In Oregon I carried around a plant identification book so I didn't have to guess at what I saw. Driving back the Southwest side is as alien yet familiar as the Willamette Valley was. The Midwest makes me tired sometimes. While I type this the doctor is out in the garage with the wood we successfully brought back without incident. Boards are planed and fit to be glued to form a table upon which wood will be placed and that wood will become something new. At work he's discouraged from being creative with his patients, playing with their organs or tying their blood vessels into new and pleasing shapes. Dead trees' families don't care. The methods are more or less the same.