Bird's Eye Maple with Walnut

Somewhere over the Atlantic. 1937. The altimeter reads 11,000 feet and the world below is nothing but cloud. The pilot doesn't look out the window. There's nothing to see. He looks at the panel. It's a beautiful thing, that panel — pale ash wood faced with dark inlaid stripes, round dials with clean Roman numerals, everything in its place, everything legible at a glance. There is no clutter. No excess. Every element exists because it must. The hands sweep. The numbers hold position. The machine tells the truth. You are not flying a 1937 aircraft. But this clock remembers one. The face is Bird's Eye Maple — and there is no other wood quite like it. Scientists have never agreed on why it happens. The prevailing theory is that the tree, stressed and starved for sunlight, attempts to grow new branches along its trunk — and fails, each aborted bud leaving behind a small, perfect knot embedded in the grain. Thousands of them. Scattered across the surface like instruments on a panel, or star