A Love Letter to Oriented Strand Board, 2025

I have seen the craftsman and artist building with maple, poplar, and pride while I wander in search for redemption in the discount lumber bin.

Oriented Strand Board! Holy particle priest! Subfloor saint!

you Frankenstein mosaic of pine shrapnel and glue dreams, you Frankenstein me.

Strapped and bound like my own past: broken-off ideas and jagged family truths

layered with pressure and heat and need and glue. The forgotten resurrection of community.

Oriented, like destiny! like the compass I never had, the one I still don’t want.

someone somewhere decided you should go that way, not this

a gesture toward order in a world made of driftwood

and that’s how I’ve survived: by pointing myself forward even when I didn’t believe in the direction. It comes together in the end.

sweet tendon of trees! you are my thoughts,

my late-night fragments, the sentence I wrote down and lost,

the chalk that didn’t hold, the conversation I left unfinished

tiny, fragile, splinters of meaning I gather every day just to stay whole.

How you hold me like a dirty gospel

rougher than birch, humbler than oak,

but you never lied to me! 

You said “I’m made of scraps and I still hold up roofs.”

You said “I don’t need to be smooth to carry weight.”

You said “You’ll get splinters, sure, but what’s a lick without taste.”

O holy OSB,

you are what I aspire to:

ugly, useful, democratic, impossible to polish,

born from a thousand different trees and still one thing.

Let the architects scorn you.

Let the finish carpenters sneer.

I will nail you to my studio wall and call it faith.

I will trace your texture with my hands and call it art.

I will press my forehead to your composite skin and say,

“Me too.”