Carved From the Wreckage
Just because it’s broken doesn’t mean it’s finished
The ice cream was already melting down my wrist when I saw her.
It was late July. I was walking through my hometown park with a soft-serve cone that tasted like diabetes and childhood.
The trees looked wrecked.
Bent. Busted. Limbs gone. Bark peeled back like rotting paint. I remembered the storm last fall—wind howling like it had a personal vendetta against this place. Folks said it was the worst they’d had in decades. Took out half the power grid, a few rooftops, and most of the big old trees in this park.
Everyone figured the city would chop the wreckage into firewood and call it good.
But someone had gotten to them first.
One stump had the beginnings of a bear rising out of it—shoulders broad, head tilted like it was listening. Another was halfway to becoming an eagle, wings spread and beak open mid-screech.
And that’s when I saw her.
She was standing barefoot in the sawdust. Tank top, cut-off jeans, cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth like punctuation. Her hair was silver and sun-stained, pulled up in a bun that didn’t want to be tamed. She held a chisel in one hand, a rubber mallet in the other, and looked like she could kill a man with kindness or with the tool she was holding—depending on how he asked the question.
“You carve these?” I asked, while I dragged melted vanilla off my wrist.
She didn’t look up. Just tapped the bear’s paw with the mallet.
“Nope,” she said. “They carve themselves. I just help ‘em out.”
She finally turned, gave me a look like she was sizing up the kind of story I’d been living.
“I’m Willow,” she said. “You look like a man who’s had his ass handed to him lately.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Couple times over.”
She nodded, not like she pitied me—but like she’d seen that look before.
“Storm didn’t ask permission,” she said, running a hand down the bear’s leg. “Just came in and knocked the hell out of everything. People wanted the city to clear the mess. Start fresh.”
“But you didn’t?”
“Nope.” She stubbed the cigarette out on a flat part of the stump and tucked it behind her ear like a hairpin. “Just because it’s broken doesn’t mean it’s done. Wood’s got memory. Storms leave scars. You carve around ‘em.”
That landed like a chisel to the chest.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I said, surprising myself. “I’m starting over. Again. Feels like failure. Feels like I got hit by something I should’ve seen coming.”
Willow snorted.
“Hell,” she said. “If people only carved clean wood, we wouldn’t have any stories worth telling. You want a smooth, straight line, go buy a 2x4 from Home Depot. You want something real?” She thumped the bear’s chest. “You work with what the storm left behind.”
She took a sip from a dented thermos and offered it to me. I passed. She didn’t seem offended.
“I used to run an art gallery in Manitou Springs,” she said. “Married a sculptor. He cheated with a woman who made wind chimes out of wine bottles. Left me the mortgage and a dog with IBS.”
I laughed. Couldn't help it. The kind that slips out when you least expect it. Like air after rain.
“I sold the house, bought this set of chisels, and started driving. Ended up here when the radiator blew outside of town.” She shrugged. “That was six months ago.”
“You stayed?”
“Hell, why not? The trees needed carving.”
She picked up the chisel again, ran it gently along the bear’s snout.
“Thing is,” she said, not looking at me, “starting over isn’t about going backward. People think it means failure. But it just means you’re still here. Still breathing. Still trying.”
I sat down on the grass, ice cream long gone, just watching her work.
The bear was almost there. You could see it now—the way its shoulders hunched forward like it was about to move, to rise up from the wreckage.
“You ever think about what it was before?” I asked. “The tree?”
She paused. Looked up.
“All the time,” she said. “But not in a sad way. That tree did its job. Provided shade. Held birds. Survived winters. Then it got knocked down. Now it gets to be something else.”
She wiped her hands on a rag that might’ve once been a bandana.
“Most folks don’t realize they get to be something else.”
We sat in silence. Not the empty kind. This silence held weight.
After a while, she packed up her tools.
“Well,” she said, slinging the roll of chisels over her shoulder. “Guess I’ll let the bear sleep for the night.”
I stood up, brushing dirt off my jeans. “Thanks,” I said.
“For what?” she asked.
“For carving something worth looking at,” I said. “And for reminding me I’m not done yet.”
She gave me a crooked grin.
“None of us are,” she said. “We just gotta learn to carve around the broken parts.”
She walked off through the trees, barefoot and steady. She belonged to the wild storms and the Earth.
I stayed a little longer, walking the loop.
There was a trout leaping out of a burned stump near the road, mouth open, frozen mid-flight. Looking like it was chasing something it could never catch, but trying anyway.
A saxophone carved from a splintered trunk, notes still etched into the wood like it hadn’t stopped playing even after the storm took its wind.
A few steps later, half-hidden in the tall grass, I saw a face carved into a tree. Long beard, deep-set eyes. Looked like some forest god had stuck around to keep an eye on things.
And just past that—a six-foot ice cream cone, bright pink and yellow and cartoon blue. Cracked, chipped, lopsided. But standing. Proud. Like someone decided this town still deserved joy.
These weren’t perfect sculptures. Some were chipped. Others unfinished.
But they were still here.
Still part of the story.
Just like me.
Your world is serving up some good metaphors lately. 👌