The tables crafted from felled trees at Takoma Park library

Good morning, DMV! It’s Wednesday, Sept. 2.

Yesterday while out running errands, I stopped in the Takoma Park Maryland Library for the first time since it reopened last September after a three-year-long expansion project. I took in the space and then saw them — tables crafted using wood from old trees that were cut down when the library was rebuilt.

Some background: Takoma Park holds its trees dearly, and there was a lot of grumbling about the felled trees. Then the city teamed up with woodworker Marcus Sims, owner of a business called Treincarnation that brings “a second beautiful life to trees which otherwise might have been thrown away.”

When I was working at the Washington Post as an editor, I suggested we have a reporter look into this story. My colleague Hau Chu (now at the Baltimore Banner) visited Sims’s workshop in Baltimore and wrote about the project last year. But the tables were still works in progress at the time, so we never got to see the finished pieces.

And now, I have. They’re amazing. Sims highlights the “live edges” and natural contours of the wood. Some have meticulously designed holes and notches.

Some crevices were filled with resin, smoothing the surface with a happy pop of color. I marveled at these pieces, running my fingers over the areas where the resin seamlessly joined the wood.

And some smaller tables in the children’s section were built with the grain of the wood on the diagonal, a librarian told me, to use up the remaining smaller fragments from the trees.

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Molly Mullin, 71, sent in this photo of the cascading fountain at Malcolm X/Meridian Hill park.

“Turns out that my son and I were in Malcolm X Park on Sunday afternoon, August 30th, the same day that you visited,” she wrote to me after reading my newsletter yesterday about my family outing with friends Sunday at the park.

“I enjoyed the drum circle as well as the myriad ways that people were having fun in the park. My focus was on the restored fountains, which are so beautiful and refreshing to see and hear on a hot day.”

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