The Crystal Fields

I collect wood for wands from here and there around my neighborhood and town, mostly gifts from the pecan, live oak, elm and plum. Sometimes I purchase exotic woods from Woodcraft, like the bocote or ebony, ironwood or tulipwood, but most of the wands I make are shaped from the old cedar, mesquite, and oak trees that dot the rolling countryside of south/central Texas.

Once a year during the bristling heat of summer I drive to an isolated ranch I call the Crystal Fields. Everywhere the ground is a crusty carpet rocks coated with quartz, hidden among the yellowing scrub grass and weeds and pockets of trees. I've brought some of those stones home, in the past, to use as the garden landscaping, but that's not why I risk the snakes and the sun. I hike through the fields, moving warily among the crystals, searching for fallen branches. And there are branches in every direction, as you might suspect. Who else would be out there picking them up? No one.

Specifically, I look for the oldest branches with grey, bleached wood on the outside but whose internal chemistry has hardened the cellulose pulp inside into a strong heartwood. Sometimes the wood has deteriorated or broken, or too easy to snap in half, but other times, occasionally, I find a solid branch of wood, not too thick, not too thin, slightly curved or wildly twisted, holding itself together despite weather and time and assuredly ants and spiders and rare deer.

These are the pieces of the Crystal Field I bring home, exposed for all their lives to the glittering stones surrounding them. I can feel a presence in them. These aren't dead branches. These are waiting branches.

I can't carve through them fast enough. So now they're still waiting branches but in my garage, preserved from the rain and sun and keeping the crystallized stones company. And my cats.