On our drive home I shuddered at the thought of the way that everything I built when I was a child, fell to staves. I fastened things together with scrap twine and nails that I managed to steal from the barn, smokehouse or even the outhouse. The only thing I had ever made that stayed together was a box trap made from sticks and tension held it together. Not possible with a chair, I thought. The wheels in my mind, however, were turning. A thought crossed my mind that would haunt me and force me, after several days, to give it a try. I decided to try my hand at building twig furniture using dogwood net hoops like Dad used in fishing nets. I would put as much care into shaping the dogwood hoop, as he did. I would learn the will of the dogwood.
What if, instead of discarded pieces of scrap twine and stolen rusty nails from the outhouse to hold my furniture together, I predrilled holes in the dogwood twigs, filled them with modern carpenter's glue and countersunk a wood screw into the hole?
Another haunting thought flooded my mind. Goose bumps popped out and I couldn't shake them down.