A faux gold trophy just didn’t seem like the way to go as we prepared to honor Maine’s best practitioners of sustainability with the first-ever Source Awards. Instead we asked Richmond woodworker Jeff Raymond to turn us some wooden bowls, an object of grace, beauty and utility.
We didn’t want our recipients to shelve the award; we want them to use it to hold spring radishes, summer tomatoes, fall apples and holiday decorations in the winter.
But when things are made by hand from natural materials, occasionally things go wrong.
Raymond wanted to work with cherry. He considered using scrap wood he’d gotten from Thos. Moser – those would be good scraps – but that cherry was from Pennsylvania. He knew these bowls had to come from Maine wood. He also knew that somewhere in his yard, near the house he built for his family, was a pile of nice cherry wood. But where? The snow was too deep to find it.
“So I put the word out,” he said, telling friends he needed a good tree or two. He found the first in the Bowdoinham woods, the second in Bowdoin, and crafted his first set of bowls. Half of them cracked; these things happen.
Spring was coming though, and over the course of that week, enough snow melted so that he could find the original cache and turn out a full new set of bowls. Why cherry, we wondered?
“I love cherry,” he said. “Because even though it is not considered highly regarded in Maine – the tree tends to be unattractive, with scaly bark – underneath all that is exceedingly beautiful wood.”
Raymond, who sells his work at the Brunswick Winter Market on Saturdays, describes cherry as “a generous wood, kind to woodworkers.” “When it is wet, it turns like butter and the inclusions, the knots and burls and black cherry streaks just do everything to enhance the beauty.”
That sounded like the perfect match for our winners, who have been generous and giving to Maine and its future.
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