White Ash

The first table I bought myself in San Francisco was made of ash. It's so sturdy two people can lie on it. Now it stands in the kitchen burdened by hills of potatoes and dishtowels.

Ash is a hard wood. They make baseball bats out of it. Art keeps a baseball bat by the door in case we ever need to brain someone who comes in.

I don't think I even know what an ash tree looks like. They didn't have too many in New York City. I don't think we have them in the Bay Area either. This picture is of a "white ash". I Wikied it and it turns out that I might have seen it on the east coast, but as my arboreal education has been quite lacking, I probably wouldn't have known it had I seen it. In school they only taught us oak, maple, elm and the evergreens. I knew about mimosas because there was one in the neighbor's front yard.

This doesn't seem to be the more romantic, possibly less hard (and less likely to be used for braining or screwing) European Mountain Ash, or Rowan tree, which is another matter entirely and a worthy subject for a separate blog post. I leave you with an image of a white ash plank. Here it is: white and hard.