Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
It’s a burl!
That’s the name of a place on Highway 199 that sells, you guessed it, burls. Burls are redwood tree tumors — um, I think. I never did find out the skinny on that. They’re hard wood, they take a nice polish, and folks love to make tables out of them. They’re not common, so they can be expensive. Anyway, I figure It’s A Burl would appreciate this dream I had last night.
Karen and I were back up north, and we had decided to look at the most expensive home on the market. (We did that for real once. The home was on the market for something like $1.2 million, WELL outside of our comfort zone, but the realtor didn’t know that. Everyone thinks doctors make a fortune, so this guy must have assumed we were qualified buyers. The home wasn’t much except for the view, which was about as dramatic as 270 degrees of California oceanfront can get, on a “little” 10 acre spit of land which, for $2 million, would come included with the house. Great investment, if we’d had the money.)
You know how the asking price on overpriced homes will sometimes drop like a rock? This place (in my dream) was doing the opposite. $1.2 million initial asking price . . . then $3 million . . . now $5 million! We had to see what was so damned special; I figured the house had to come with its own harem.
What it had was burls. Each and every cabinet was a polished burl, the counter tops were burl, the island was a burl.
I thought, that’s a lot of burls.
And I thought, maybe too much of a good thing.
Sometimes prices don’t have much correspondence to reality. That’s one of the things we’ve noticed while looking at Bakersfield homes on the internet — the same quality home might sell for $150/square foot as a foreclosure, $400/square foot as a new offering. We’ve discovered that “pricier” does not necessarily correspond to “better.”
Oh, well. We don’t want burl-fronted cabinetry. All we want is our killer kitchen. And our killer master bathroom. And a large master bedroom. Oh, and a harem. Can’t forget the harem.
D.
Are you using the editorial (or the royal) we in the last paragraph? Or is there really a mutual familial desire for a harem? Guess is the occupants (denizens?) of the harem do whatever is requested, maybe they could keep the place clean too.
I think it’s a unique meld of the royal and plural we. And, yes, I imagine they’ll be delighted to keep our house clean.
A burl, if I remember right, is when a tree is damaged somehow – often by a nail, insects, or lightning – and the tree grows all around the injury to heal it, usually in a curly, somewhat erratic kind of way. It’s sorta like an oyster will make a pearl around a grain of sand. They’re on all kinds of trees and they’re the roundish lumpy tumor looking things on a trunk. They’re not tumors, they’re more like… scars. Anyway, when the wood’s harvested, sometimes the burls are saved. Walnut and Maple burls are especially pretty – and pricey. 🙂 But you have to be REALLY careful when cutting into one because if the source was a nail or other foreign matter it can break the saw blade and, if the blade screws up, wreck the burl as a usable piece of wood.
My honey does woodworking. 😛
Interesting! I thought it was unique to redwood. Now I’ll have to search out maple and walnut burls on the ‘net.