The Kitchen Built From Grandpa’s Barn

The stall board

I found the initials on the second Saturday in June, while Owen was at a baseball game in Lisbon and I was denailing the last of the stall boards by myself.

It was a wide oak board, close to eleven inches, smooth on one face from horses rubbing on it for years.

When I flipped it over to get at a nail, I saw letters cut into the wood, about four feet up from what had been the bottom end.

M.H. And under that a plus sign, then E.S., and under that, 1948.

They were cut deep and careful, with a pocketknife I would guess, the letters squared off the way a man carves when he means it to last.

Somebody had gone over them more than once. The edges were worn soft, like they had been touched a lot of times.

I stood there in the shop for a long time holding that board. Then I went in the house and found Megan folding towels in the laundry room and asked her to come out to the shop with me.

She saw it from the doorway. She put her hand over her mouth and walked over and touched the letters with two fingers, very lightly, as if they might come off.

“That’s Grandpa and Grandma,” she said. “That was the stall where he kept Duke. The big gray horse. Mom used to tell me about it.” She traced the numbers. “Merle Hollis and Eileen Sandvig. That’s the year they married and the year they built it. He told me once he carved it the day they hung the doors.”

“I want to put it somewhere,” I said. “Somewhere it’ll be seen every day.”

Megan thought about it for a minute. Then she said, “The pantry door. Put it on the pantry door, where you’d see it every time you go in for flour.”

So that is what I did. I set that board aside with a piece of tape on it that said “Do not cut” in Owen’s handwriting, because I did not trust myself not to grab it by accident some night when I was tired.