Brazilian walnut is hard wood. It’s used for decks and patios and sunrooms, outdoor use, because it’s dense and strong and resists decay. The bugs and beetles won’t eat it. We’re using it to build a little stoop in Somerville outside the side door of a condo building that looks straight out of a photo-feature in Dwell, all clean concrete lines and well-appointed roofdecks, inhabited by people at home in the modern world. We’re rebuilding the little stoop because someone drove into the old one, and given the size and shape of the driveway (short, narrow), it’s a mystery as to how someone could’ve demolished the thing (and their car, according to the neighbors) so thoroughly.

We removed the old decking first. In the first thirty minutes of the day, pulling out a nail, I scraped my knuckles across concrete and bled well. We framed the thing, secured it, hammered galvanized nails, and I kept bending them. I’ve been unsteadied, and my hits did not land true. It didn’t feel frustrating today. It felt like defeat. When the nails did slide in straight, the relief I felt registered in the space around my heart, a feelable unclenching.

The wood smells like cinnamon, molasses, a little bit like chocolate. Usually I try not to breathe in the wood smells, suspicious always about chemicals and carcinogens. Today I breathed it all. I smelled it as I chopped piece after piece, in all the sawdust plumes. And I smelled it on my left forearm, because the breeze was blowing west and the sawdust stuck to my sweating, sun-tan lotioned arm.

Other names for Brazilian walnut: embuya, imbuya, canela-imbuia. Somehow those sound the way this wood smells.