Earlywood: My Willow Phase

Publisher’s note: Good morning, and welcome to Earlywood, a free excerpt from one of the thousands of pieces I’ve written since 1996. Sometimes, it’s from a magazine article. Or a book. Or (in this case) a blog post published in 2018. Each entry has been updated or annotated with some modern context or point of view. Enjoy!

The unpleasant funny about visiting your family during the holidays is encountering your former woodworking self.

Seven years ago, I was in Charleston, South Carolina, with my dad and encountered my Late Willow Phase, a time during the 1990s when I was obsessed with rustic furniture. I had honestly forgotten about this phase (unlike my leather trousers phase).

For a couple of years, I drove around in my Volvo 240DL station wagon cutting willow switches out of ditches on the Westside of Cincinnati. I stored all these sticks in buckets in my shop, giving it an arboreal look. Using a drill and a tenon cutter, I made dozens of chairs, trellises, frames, anything you could…