​FICTION         
​Redwoods     -     Weebly.com                              

Burl
by Denize Springer

The couple selected a redwood burl bowl after closely admiring other pieces by the same artist that were shinier and more decorative. But this less refined, yet more expensive specimen called out to them. And it seemed to have a lot to say.
 
In fact, it would tell them more than they ever thought they knew about themselves and their decades together. It would go home with them—but not without a little intrigue and the kind of struggle common to long marriages.
 
It was an unusual shape for a hardwood bowl, and perhaps that is what made it so expensive. It was shallow and round, but with a bell-shaped lip more common to blown glass vases or pitchers. And it must have been difficult to carve without breaking because there were two very deep and dark, bubbling black gouges out of its side that seemed important, but certainly not pretty.
 
Burl, what arborists or naturalists might sometimes refer to as “insults,” are interruptions in the growth of a redwood’s trunk and evidence of strife in a tree’s life like a wildfire or a virus. Redwoods are particularly hearty when it comes to such trials. They respond to things like California’s six months of summer without rain with the ability to trap fog in their tiny needles and live on this meager moisture. When a fire or virus occurs, they produce a ball of scar tissue. Most of the oldest redwoods in California, some more than 2,000 years old, openly display the horror of their histories in the form of burl, which can range in size from that of a child’s fist to a small car.
 
Early on in the couple’s marriage, when they first moved to the northern California coast, burl was everywhere and in every form: rocking chairs, picture frames, coffee tables, children’s toys. Even the church in which they wed, had one in front of its sanctuary. It was so smooth from the generations of fannies that had graced it, that there was a subtle dip in the center, which the couple noticed only when they sat on it and then slid together in the middle, enjoining the fleshiest parts of their bodies.
 
A few months before the couple’s 10th wedding anniversary, they bought a house made of redwood that clung to a hillside in a small forest of young trees. Only 40 or 50 years old, these redwoods nonetheless towered over the house at about 100 feet in height. By that time, they had both learned that redwood was very dense and therefore very heavy. They knew that if one ever fell on their house, it would most certainly crack it open like a walnut. Nonetheless, these young trees stood straight and tall, like stolid sentries, able to turn the heavy winter rains, pounding like fists on their canopies, into barely a trickle by the time it reached the house and the marriage taking root below.
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The store proprietor carefully wrapped up the bowl and included the card of its carver, a local man. He might have been young, but the couple suspected he was most likely closer to their age. The skill in the carving revealed a lifetime of experience with burl, which was harder to find now after it had become apparent that to remove burl from a thriving tree could invite sickness and kill it.
 
The couple put their new treasure in the trunk of the car and took an antique, steam train ride through a forest of old growth. When they returned to their hotel, they quarreled about whether the bowl would be safer in the trunk or brought inside. She didn’t like the idea of it rolling around in the car trunk wherever they went, and he thought it would be less safe in the hotel room, where it could be eyed by others.
 
“As if anyone else would admire or want it,” she said. She was already regretting the purchase, recalling the bowl’s blackened gouges and the rest of its flaws.
 
They enjoyed an evening outdoor concert and the next day, an unusually sunny and calm one on the coast, they took their first kayak trip on the Pacific. That night, the last night of their 40th anniversary weekend, they celebrated the sunset with a bottle of local Pino.
 
Originally, they had planned to do more to celebrate four decades together but these plans faded with a year full of pain including bouts of skin cancer, a wildfire that had come perilously close to their home, the deaths of two good friends and the self-inflicted end of a sibling who had suffered his whole life from an incurable disease. The couple had spent so much time on planes coming from and going to the funerals that the thought of a long-anticipated trip to Europe just exhausted them. So, they put it off and opted instead for their weekend at a rustic resort just a few hours up the coast.
 
Smiling all the way home, they marveled how just a few days away, felt like a month of vacation. Their mood changed upon their return home, however, when they unpacked the car and found that the burl bowl was missing. They first suspected the kayak rental operators who insisted that all car keys be left in their office while their owners were paddling the Pacific.
 
Secretly, however, each one blamed the other for the mysterious disappearance of the bowl. He suspected that his wife, often distracted when shopping, left the car unlocked at one of their various stops along the way. 
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​She, on the other hand, was struggling with her growing suspicion that her husband was showing signs of Alzheimer’s. Over the past year he seemed to have lost his ability to remember recent history, like a movie they had just seen, or that he had picked up a quart of milk the day before he brought another home. She remembered handing the bowl to her husband but didn’t recall seeing him put it in the trunk. Was it actually carried to the car in the first place? Was it taken into the room and forgotten? Her husband insisted he did not bring it into their room, and she knew she hadn’t.
 
Neither shared their suspicion with the other. Instead they did what they had learned to do over their long marriage, which was to suck it up as a bump in the road, and never share any suspicions without concrete evidence. After all, they had had a safe and very enjoyable trip. They counted their blessings, particularly the sunny weather that could have just as well been the more common gloomy, cold summer fare along the California coast.
 
Nonetheless, each silently dreaded the arrival of the credit card bill on which the cost of their now lost treasure would appear. Once they each returned to work however, the bowl and the happy memory of their brief trip started to fade in both their minds.
 
A night or two into a new week, she had a dream about finding a shiny, new dime in a muddy puddle. She awoke inspired to call the resort and, hope against hope, request that the housekeeping staff take a look inside the various drawers and cabinets in Cabin 54.
 
She was careful not to relay her dream (or her plans) to her husband before breakfast. Her mother had always maintained that to tell a dream before breakfast would prevent it from coming true. So, as soon as they had their breakfast dishes in the washer, she described her dream to her husband and announced, “I’m going to call the hotel.”
 
“What for?”
 
“I’m going to ask them to check in all those cabinets in our room.”
 
“I didn’t use any, did you?”
 
“No. I don’t remember using any either, but just in case we forgot.”
 
The manager and the head of housekeeping were off the day she called, but the front desk staff assured her that they would relay the message and get back to her as soon as they could.
 
It was almost a week since they departed the hotel when someone from the office staff finally called. Despite being on a noisy commuter train, she took the call expecting to hear how thoroughly the hotel staff had searched the room and found nothing.
 
“Sorry, we haven’t gotten back to you sooner,” the female voice on the other end said. “But I want to tell you we found your bowl.”
 
These words struck like lightning. She gasped.
 
“If you allow us to use the credit card you used for your stay, we will add the return postage to your bill.”
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Arrangements were made. She could hardly wait to tell her husband. She thought about calling him at work, then decided to wait until she got home.
 
She didn’t even have her jacket off when she sought him out and said, “Guess what?”
 
“What?”
 
“They found the bowl! The hotel! It was in one of those cabinets in the room.”
 
The look on her husband’s face expressed exactly how she felt when she first heard the news. But then it darkened.
 
“I don’t remember taking it out of the car and putting it there.”
 
She waited for a minute, hoping he would recall something, but he remained silent, his expression dark.
 
“So what,” she cried triumphantly, “I don’t either!”
 
The bowl, smaller and lighter than she remembered, arrived a week later. It took some time before she found just the right place to display it in their living room. Each time she picked it up to move it, she fingered the black gouges—no doubt a terrible fire—and studied the patterns of tiny knots, slashes and curves in the burl that varied in color from dark to light and back again. There were no orderly rings like that of a trunk with varying widths that revealed good, moist years of growth and lesser years when progress was stifled by drought or fire. Instead, this other kind of growth purposefully covered, protected and comforted the “insults” of lives long lived. 
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Denize Springer’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in various publications and literary journals including the Marin IJ, East Bay Express, Pearl, Estero, Vistas & Byways and Ocean Realm. Her short story, “The Way We Say Goodbye,” was named a semi-finalist in the 2019 Tillie Olsen Short Story Award and will appear in the online journal Please See Me in early 2020. Her plays and adaptations have been presented in New York and San Francisco venues including the New York Theatre Workshop, the Public Theatre and the Bay Area Playwrights Festival. She earned an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University and has taught creative writing courses at OLLI at SF State.
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Vistas & Byways Review is the semiannual journal of fiction, nonfiction and poetry by members of Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at San Francisco State University​.​
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