My brother still lives through these maple planks

Sssssiiissh. Sssssiiissh. Sssssiiissh.

That’s the sound of my joiner plane as it slices paper-thin shavings of maple. Every cut brings back a memory — or a regret — about my late younger brother, Pick.

I enjoy using hand tools when I work with wood. It’s so tactile and somehow brings you back to the place where the trees grew. You appreciate the unique grain and character of each plank far more than you do by machining it.

In this case, though, the wood has extra special meaning.

The planks are from trees that Pick logged on his property overlooking Hood Canal. The beautifully-grained wood was intended for the interior window sills and hand railings of the custom house he started building there but never quite finished.

The thick slabs of maple — still roughedged with chainsaw marks — were still lying on the entryway floor, unused, when he died in 2016, three months short of his 56th birthday.

I recovered that wood before selling the house, and it has been stacked in my garage for seven years. I had been saving it for a memorable project. And so now I’m turning some of it into kitchen cabinets for my daughter’s home in Bothell.

As I work the wood, I think of how Pick labored to turn the raw logs into thick planks. It had to be hard work. Maple is like rock, and its irregular grain makes machining and truing up difficult.

Igor — Pick’s given name — was like that, too. He was a force of nature, with rock-hard muscles, hands like sledgehammers and a mind and character often unyielding to sound advice and common sense. Imagine him as a Paul Bunyan on steroids. To say he was his own man so dramatically understates the case. He was loud, often politically incorrect, worked and played hard and roared down country roads on the loudest, biggest Harley-Davidson he could buy. He was an indefatigable risk taker, sailing the oceans and climbing sheer cliffs. It was so poetically unjust that he died from cancer, slowly withering away instead of perishing on some perilous adventure.

Pick had dyslexia and was never bookish, and our age difference (4 years) kept us from ever really becoming close. So I’m glad to have those planks of maple. They’re like continuing to have a piece of him around.

As I plane, saw and shape those boards into finished cabinets, I recognize that the lumber is his posthumous contribution, a joint project that transcends his death.

I’ll think of Pick every time I look at the finished cabinet doors. Their swirling, irregular and often tortuous grain patterns will be a memorial to his wild and unfettered character.

A far better monument than any grave marker..