The bowl made from an ash burl sits on my desk serving up Post-It Notes as needed, the bowl yellowy-brown and rugged on the top, the notes screaming in fluorescent pink and orange; the bowl smoothly curved, the notes all right angles and sharp edges. The bowl began as a tree that became a log that my colleague took to a local woodworker to commission a set of bowls to give to friends at Christmas. I know who gave me the bowl and I think of her generosity every day; I know who made the bowl because his signature appears on the bottom.
But who made the Post-It Notes? I see no signature at the bottom of the pack, no sign that the stack of colorful notes was touched by human hands. Robots? Machines? Whose hands made the robots? Whose mind designed the machines? Who grew and cut the trees, who transported them to the paper mill and transformed them to mush?
The bowl reveals signs of the tree and the hands that put the wood on the lathe and worked with meticulous care around the roughly burled edges, but the Post-It Notes tells me nothing of the tree, prefers instead to boss me around: buy birdseed; change the oil in the Camry; prep tomorrow's classes. The notes move from bowl to desk to trash can while the bowl sits immobile and usually unnoticed on my desk, reminding me of kindness, of careful work, of the long life and forgotten death of a tree.
2 comments:
It must have been a good assignment! I can almost feel the bowl in my hands.
Thanks! It's a very simple assignment for my creative nonfiction class: write a brief observation (around 250 words) describing anything you've seen, heard, or thought within the past 24 hours. Later, they'll cobble together several of these observations to form a mosaic essay.
But by the time I got around to trying it, I was too exhausted and harried to leave my office, so I just looked around my office and wrote about what caught my eye.
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