1) Back in the 1970s, my cousin Hal lent us an oddity, a cypress knee sliced in roughly one-inch slices to show the winding path of a carpenter bee. Mother thought it was fascinating — Nature! Science! — and I have to admit it was pretty cool to see how the bee had gnawed its way through almost every part of it, doubling back on itself a couple times. I remember it resting on a metal pie plate in the den throughout my teens. Eventually Hal reclaimed it for his own home.
2) Fast forward to 1988-90, the two years I lived in Allston Ghetto to the Stars. In a Harvard Avenue junk shop I bought a beat-up round wooden occasional table for $10. The round top was just scrap lumber sanded smooth, but the base was carved with a ridged urn that tapered into three elegant legs. It was the perfect size to display a white linen tablecloth my grandmother had given me.
2a) It served me well for many years, but at some point in the last five years I relegated it (without the tablecloth) to the back porch. It has weathered into a beautiful state of shabby gentility since then. I just love it.
3) What could these two wooden articles have in common? I think we know . . .
. . . and a telltale hole!
3a) Yesterday I opened the back porch for the season: rehanging the bamboo blinds, brushing off the sofa cushions, bringing up the café table and chairs, and placing that wooden table back in its place by the sofa. After a couple hours I noticed a tiny drift of what looked like wood shavings underneath that table, and recalled occasionally seeing similar last summer. The, shall we say, unnatural interest of a neighboring bumblebee in the tabletop also aroused memories of last summer and having to swat it away with a pillow. Wouldn’t you know it, there is a neat, entirely round hole underneath the tabletop. Something is in there!
3b) So as much as I love this table, I fear the time has come for me to “move it forward into the Universe” in order to preserve the rest of my wooden house.