This summer I was clearing out the house where I grew up in order to put it on the market. After 56 years of continuous inhabitation by the Smith family you can guess that it was filled with memorabilia of my past. I found two small stools that I had made in shop in the seventh grade. They weren’t great but I thought they would do as gifts for my small grandchildren. So at my 70th birthday celebration in Vermont this summer I delivered them to my two sets of grandchildren. After a week long celebration the families headed out and we cleaned up. In a bathroom I discovered that one of the stools had been left behind.

My wife appropriated it when we got back home as there were some high cabinets that she could not reach. So I thought I should make her one to replace it when it eventually got back to the proper grandchild. It was a week before Christmas and I had been so busy with Fall shows and filling orders for knit shops for my knitted shawl and sweater clasps that I had not even started on the project

As I was looking at my lumber stack in the shop I found a board that was filled with memories. Shortly before he died in 1980 my father had the boys from the local saw mill come and cut up a cherry tree that had fallen in the wind. When I went to pick up the wood, Bubba Adams, the sawyer, reached into his pocket and produced a steel spike and a ceramic fence post arrestor. He said: “Would you happen to know anything about this.” With much embarrassment I admitted that my father and I had put that on the tree 35 years earlier when we had horses. The horses were long gone and the tree had grown around the spike and we had forgotten all about it.

“Well, the saw found it.”Bubba grumbled..

I thanked him profusely and loaded the wood. He would not take any money for his efforts. So I made a Chippendale mirror for him and his adopted brother out of the wood and I know that they hang proudly in their respective houses.

One of the two inch thick slabs had a dark stain and axe marks where the metal had been chopped out of the wood. I thought at the time that I should make something special out of this wood that would incorporate all the memories it held. So 28 years later, after having moved that wood from Virginia to Iowa, to New Mexico, to Kentucky and finally to Maryland I decided that this would be the next best time.

I wanted to design something better than what I had done in junior high school. The slab was a good 15 inches wide. My planer is only 12 inches. So I decided to do a somewhat rustic design and incorporate some of the natural edge of one side of the board and make a roughly triangular three legged stool with a 15 x 19 inch top. One advantage of a three legged stool is that even if the floor is uneven, and most are, it will sit flat without rocking.

Read the rest of the story on my main blog at For the Love of Wood.