I saw it, and I had to lower myself right down onto that stool, because the hollow underneath was full of little wooden birds.
Thirty of them. Laid in rows on a folded flour sack, chickadees and wrens and one cardinal, no bigger than an egg apiece, sanded so smooth they felt like soap.
I picked one up and turned it over, and on the flat of the bottom, in pencil, was a date. 1996.
Every one of them had a year on it. 1996 through 2025. Thirty birds, thirty years, one for every anniversary we ever had, and he never gave me a single one.
The early ones are rough. The 1996 chickadee has a beak like a hatchet and one wing bigger than the other and I have not been able to put it down since. By about 2008 the man knew what he was doing. The last one, this year’s, is a wren with its head turned, and the feather lines are cut so fine you can see them from across the room, and it was still soft with linseed oil when I found it.
Wesley worked at the water plant for thirty-one years and came home and went out to that garage every evening of his life and I thought he was just avoiding the television.
Under the birds was a piece of shop paper.
Marilyn — I have never in thirty years been able to hand you one of these. Every time I go to, it looks like nothing in my hand and I put it in the drawer and buy you something from the store instead. So here is all of them at once. The stool was the only way I could think of to make you sit down long enough to look. Sit on it a while before you judge it. — Wes
The stool was the only way I could think of to make you sit down.
Thirty years I opened department store boxes from that man every April — a robe, a set of towels, a coffee maker one year — and I thought that was who he was, a man with no imagination who got it done at the last minute on his way home. He was buying those things to cover for the bird he’d chickened out on giving me.
I stuck that stool in the corner of the kitchen and let him watch me not care. Two weeks later he was gone out in that garage before the squad car got up our road.
Our son found the rest of it when he cleaned out the shop. A cigar box of blanks cut and started — 2026, 2027, 2028, roughed out and waiting, four of them, because Wesley worked ahead when the wood was good.
He was carving them into years he didn’t have.
The birds are on the windowsill over the sink now, in order, 1996 on the left where I can see the crooked wing while I do the dishes. My daughter-in-law asked me which one is my favorite and I said the ugly one and she thought I was being funny.
I sit on that stool every morning with my coffee. It fits me exactly, and it would, because the man measured me for it and never said so.