The Roanoke table took five months from first cut to final finish.
A dining table built from a single figured slab wide enough to seat eight, with butterfly keys inlaid at two natural cracks that Colleen chose to leave visible rather than fill with epoxy.
Because cracks in wood that has survived what this wood survived aren't flaws. They're seams.
Evidence of where the stress was greatest, the places where the tree held on hardest, the joins between endurance at its limit and endurance at its source.
Hiding them would have been the same as pretending the tree had never been tested, which would have been a lie told in wood.
The worst kind of lie, because wood remembers everything.
The family drove down from Roanoke to pick it up themselves rather than trust it to a shipper.
They stood in the shop looking at it for a long time: a husband, a wife, and their grown daughter, who'd come along because she'd heard her parents talk about this table for months.
Heard them describe the grain, the weight, the woman who'd built it from wood a timber yard had thrown away.
The daughter ran her fingertips across the surface slowly, tracing the waves of figure the way a person traces the contours of a map showing a place they've never visited but already feel drawn to.
"It's not what I expected," the daughter admitted. "It's better.
It looks alive."
Colleen helped them wrap it in quilted blankets for the drive home.
She didn't charge extra for the butterfly keys, for the hand-rubbed finish, or for the five months of work that had gone into a piece of furniture most production mills could have approximated in an afternoon using veneer over particle board.
She charged what she'd quoted because the price she'd set wasn't based on what the market would bear.
It was based on what the work was worth, measured not in hours but in years.
Thirty-eight years of learning. One year of drying.
Sixty years of a tree refusing to fall.
More commissions followed.
A blanket chest for a retired schoolteacher in Knoxville who wanted something to hold the quilts her mother had sewn during the Depression.
Quilts too precious for a cedar chest from a catalog, because cedar chests from catalogs come with somebody else's story already built in.
A writing desk for a novelist in the Blue Ridge who needed a surface that wouldn't let him forget that the blank page is its own kind of storm.
That putting words down is its own kind of grain. That the only writing worth reading comes from the same place the only wood worth building from comes from, which is the place where resistance meets patience meets time.
Colleen kept her prices fair even as the list grew past what she could comfortably keep pace with.