It was Never Mine

This piece is currently available for purchase.
Hand-carved Sugar Maple, Milk Paint
$2,200
Harvested in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, on the West End of the Keweenaw Peninsula.

Text Reads:

“On August 30th of the year two-thousand and twenty one, according to the Gregorian calendar, of which means nothing to a patch of growing moss or aging maple, I pried a nail from between two planks of wood, the boards wailing as the hole let go of it’s metal tongue. 

My father watched as I tore apart the abandoned fishing shanty at the east corner of the pasture and said that I didn't need to trouble myself anymore. 

That the clouds and the trees and the pollen; and the standing deadwood, and the earthworms, and the rubber tires and broken fences, and the mangled window frames stored in the collapsing outhouse, and the cherry tree and towering aspens, the majestic pine and the dwarf hazelnut, the gluttonous caterpillars and the parched grasses, and the succulent raspberries and the spotted winged drosophila residing in them, the mosquito larvae and the swingless swing set, and the pitted iron cook stove, and the august sunsets and the bones of every dog, horse and rabbit, and the fucked up garbage bins, unrepaired from yet another surly black bear, and the heart I buried between two trees which are now three; all 25 million square feet of land, (if measured by the foot prints of a large transient fowl), I no longer had to care for, for all of it was no longer mine.  

Upon hearing this, I paused for a moment. then continued to rip the last nail from its place. It let out a cry that I swear was heard by the sleeping fawn six miles away and I replied: 

‘It was never mine to begin with’.”