The Porch Wood The Contractor Took

The space behind the barn was empty, and I knew before I was all the way to it what empty meant.

I had walked out there on a Tuesday in April to lay my hand on the oak, the way I did most mornings. It had become a habit I did not question.

Walt had stacked that lumber himself. Four hundred and some board feet of white oak, stickered and drying under a tin lean-to he built just for it.

Every morning I would walk out with my coffee and set my palm flat on the top board. It was the closest thing I had to touching him.

And that Tuesday the stack was gone. The tin roof stood over bare gravel. There were pale rectangles in the dirt where the stickers had kept the ground dry.

I stood there in my robe with my coffee going cold and I did not cry. I had done most of my crying already, and this was a different feeling.

This was the feeling of a thing being taken that was never anyone’s to take.

Let me tell you about the oak, because you cannot understand the rest until you understand the wood.

My husband was Walt Kessler. We were married forty-one years. He kept the county’s trucks running by day and he ran a little bandsaw mill behind our barn for the pure love of it.

A white oak had come down in the big ice storm, out on the north line, a tree older than the both of us put together. Walt would not let it rot.

He spent a whole summer of evenings cutting it into boards. I would carry a plate out to the mill and he would not stop sawing to eat it.

He milled it quartersawn, which I did not know the meaning of until he showed me how the grain stood up in little flecks when the light hit it right.

Then he stacked it under that lean-to with a thin sticker between every board so the air could move, and he told me it had to dry a year before it was fit to build with.

He was building me a porch.

I had wanted a porch for thirty years. A real one, on the east side, where I could sit with my coffee and watch the sun come up over the Hagen place across the road.

Walt kept saying he would get to it. A farm wife learns that the thing her husband promises to get to is a thing she will likely do herself or do without.

But this time he meant it. When he started cutting that oak I understood he was finally going to build me my porch, and he was going to build it out of a tree instead of out of the lumberyard.