A burl is an abnormal, bulbous growth on a tree where grain twists in response to a wound—a tumor, a scar, a graft—an outgrowth that never became a branch, yielding swirling, figured patterns with no straight grain. Slabs this dramatic rarely exceed a foot or two; two forty‑inch cookies from the same burl are almost mythic. 
 
In 2017, in a chemistry class, I watched one of my heroes, Gara Wood, take the epoxy river craze into the chair world. Years later, in 2025, a seller offered two walnut cookies wide enough for the bilateral bookmatch that is non‑negotiable for my chairs. I paid a couple thousand during the peak of dental school because the chance to mirror a burl across a chair was rarer than the money. I planned every cut and mirrored seam, refusing to sand away the thorny spines at the bark edge—the tree’s scars—and poured semi‑translucent epoxy to honor each feature so, under gallery light, the curves and voids surface again. This piece is a tribute to those who have fought cancer, directly and indirectly, and to my professor, William Ranahan, who taught me there is hope in that fight.