By profession, the younger of our two sons is a scientist. Through love of nature he is a skilled skier, canoeist, kayaker, intrepid hiker-adventurer. And by nature he is also a lover of wood, an imaginative worker of wood, and also by inclination a potter, to round out his many interests and talents.

There was a mature cherry tree that grew in front of his house in Vancouver, close to a bus stop. One day he saw a municipal crew cutting down that cherry tree. He enquired, not being a botanist, and they informed him it was deemed to be diseased. They hauled away the trunk they'd cut down and drove it over to a beach where they often left such limbs and trunks of trees the city cleared away in the urban forest. He, knowing this, drove his truck there, and he managed with the help of a winch he keeps on the truck, to load the trunk into the truck, then he drove it to an site where professionals made a living cutting tree trunks into planks.

He brought home the planks and put them into his garage, to give them a chance to dry gradually. And then he thought about what he would do with his bounty of beautiful cherry. When he was much, much younger he had worked over the space of a summer slowly putting together, entirely with handtools and with not one nail, a replica that he had himself designed, based on an American 18th Century lowboy. He constructed it of walnut, and it sits today in our family room.

He had also made a few armoires of pine, basing his design on French-Canadian furniture of the 19th Century. One of them (based on a classic French 18th-Century design) he sold, the other, a diamond-point design, he gave as a gift to his sister. The exquisite design and workmanship of his craft; his meticulous attention to detail cannot be overstated. He is a perfectionist, which his father is not, being of a more practical nature in that respect, though they both share a passion for woodworking. When he was with us in January he took home with him to Vancouver a few more of the 18th-19th-Century woodworking planes that they both had acquired over many years.

Many years later he made a swing-leg, drop-leaf oval side-table that he also had designed, as a replica, and that was made of cherrywood, and it too sits in our family room. Atop it sits a photograph of our son and close beside that photograph are two pieces of pottery he gave us ages ago.

The first thing he decided to make using that cherry trunk that he had rescued from the beach, was a gift for my 78th birthday. It now sits on my kitchen counter. It's a beautiful cutting board; aside from its aesthetic, its practical value as a kitchen tool is fairly obvious.