Addendum

     The previous post hurried to "meet deadline", and I went to press without Jurgen's pictures. I have since received a dozen and a half good pictures from him, so I will use them to build an addendum to the blog about their visit.

     Just for the record, here's where we are, and here's the opening view.

     Here are four successive views as you move toward that massive trunk. There's an interesting side story about the big live oaks. In 1989 the US Navy was in the midst of a major overhaul of the USS Constitution..."Old Ironsides". Among many other repairs, several of the curved ribs of that old ship needed to be replaced. Building those curved ribs out of straight timbers would have required some serious joinery. Finding curved limbs would give the restorers two major advantages: hundreds of hours of work would be eliminated, and the single-piece rib would be stronger. Well, along came a gift from the heavens. Hurricane Hugo did major damage to the live oaks in South Carolina. Through some unforeseen connection between the arborist, clean-up crews and the ship restorers the clean-up resulted in many flatbed trucks loaded with large curved timbers heading north to Boston. As a result there is a lot of South Carolina oak in Old Ironsides.
     Woodworkers are happy to find a burl to work with because of the swirling grain. They generally range in size from a cantaloupe to a basketball. Here's one the size of a desk or a large coffee table.

     The initial suggestion to, "Let's go look at a tree." did not evoke great excitement, But when they saw it, they were truly impressed.

     There is another link that ties the two families together over the last forty years. I had purchased a fine, Yamaha, upright, piano for Cindy in 1969 in Colorado. Ten years later she graduated from high school in NH and left for the University of Oklahoma. Mark did not have the interest or talent to inherit the piano, so we looked for a place to sell it. Susan Gobien was (and is) active in the leadership of church music and really needed a piano. So, one icy February day in NH Jurgen and I wrestled that piano out of the house, up the driveway and into a rental trailer for a winter drive to Rome, NY. The first thing Susan did was to call a piano tuner to appease all of the insults the piano received on the trip. We were all relieved and pleased when the tuner said, "I barely had to do a thing. That's a wonderful piano." The piano now resides in the home of the Gobien's son, Andrew where it is in active use today.
     It was a wonderful visit.