Stories told in smoke.

There's a half-second, every single time, where the tip touches the wood and my whole body tenses like I'm about to be told off. Eighteen-twenty, that's how long I've been doing this, and the flinch never fully left. I've stopped trying to make it leave.

People assume the hard part is the skill — the shading, the steady hand, the not-burning-yourself. It isn't. The hard part is that wood doesn't have an undo. Pencil erases. Paint covers. Fire stays. The mark you make in the first second is the mark that's there in a hundred years.

I used to fight that. Now I think it's the whole point.

My brain runs a little fast and a little loud, and most things in my life have a backspace key I lean on too hard. Burning doesn't. It makes me slow down to the speed of the heat. One line. Wait. Breathe. The next line only happens when the first one is finished happening. For someone who is usually three thoughts ahead of herself, that's not a limitation. That's medicine.

So yes — first burn, still a flinch. And then the shoulders drop, and the room goes quiet, and it's just me and the grain having a slow conversation neither of us can take back.

Everyone starts on basswood. It's soft, it's pale, it takes the heat like it's grateful. I love it. But birch is the one I think about when I can't sleep.

Birch has opinions. The grain shifts density without warning — soft, soft, soft, then a hard ribbon that throws your line if you're not paying full attention. You can't autopilot birch. It demands that you stay here, in the wood, in the second you're in.

I get asked a lot why I don't just print my designs and burn over a transfer to be safe. Because safe isn't the thing I'm selling. The little wobble where the grain fought me, the deeper char where the wood drank more heat — that's the proof a person sat here and did this by hand, on purpose, knowing it couldn't be undone.

A machine could make it perfect. I'm not interested in perfect. I'm interested in true.

The email came in at 1 a.m., which is usually when the real ones come in. She wanted a portrait of her dog. He'd passed three weeks earlier. His name was Biscuit and she sent me forty photos and apologized for sending forty photos.

Don't apologize for the forty photos. The forty photos are how I find the one thing that makes a portrait stop being a picture and start being him — in Biscuit's case, one ear that never fully stood up. Every good photo, that ear was doing its own thing. So that's where I started. Not the eyes. The ear.

Memorial pieces are the ones I burn slowest. There's no rushing a goodbye.

I worked on him for the better part of two weeks. When she opened the box, she sent me a voice note instead of a text, and she couldn't really get the words out, and honestly neither could I. That's the part of this job nobody warns you about — that sometimes you're not making décor, you're making the thing that lets someone keep a little of what they lost.

Biscuit lives on a mantel in Sherwood Park now, ear and all. That's the best review I'll ever get.