I wasn't looking for Morley.

I was buying dinner.

I've been stopping at Stephen's Butcher Shop in Port Carling for years. If you spend summers in Muskoka — particularly if you care about good food — there's a fair chance you've been there too. The Stephen family has been serving Muskoka since 1927, when Arnold Stephen first opened a meat and grocery store near the bridge in Port Carling. Today, 99 years later, the family business is still alive and well — not far from where the original grocery store stood.

Earlier this summer, I stopped by the shop as I had many times before.

And leaning against the building, I saw a cross section of a tree.

It was enormous.

The slab was nearly 28 inches across, several inches thick and somewhere around 40 pounds. It was ash, with more than 80 years visible across its surface. I had no idea then that the tree had been standing on this property long before Stephen's Butcher Shop came to be there — or how much of the Stephen family's history had happened around it.

I just knew I wanted to print it.

The story came afterward.

In the early 1960s, Morley Stephen bought this piece of waterfront property in Port Carling. It came with a cottage, which was eventually moved elsewhere. In 1963 Morley began building the house that stands there today - a home that he and his new wife, Dawn, moved in after they married in 1964.

People thought he was crazy for putting it so far back from the water. Morley thought they were crazy. Why build at the bottom of the property when he'd have to shovel a driveway that long every Muskoka winter?

But there was another consideration.

Three beautiful, healthy ash trees stood on the property, and Morley didn't want to cut them down. Their location helped determine where the house would be built.

One of those trees was this one.

For decades afterward, it remained part of the Stephen family's life. Morley's grandchildren swung from its branches. The family lived around it. And eventually, Stephen's Butcher Shop — the business Morley carried forward from his father — came to operate on the same property.

Then came the emerald ash borer.

All three ash trees were eventually lost.

The family was gutted; they held on to that great slab because they wanted to do something with it someday — they just didn't know what that “something” would be.

And that was the enormous slab I happened to notice leaning against the butcher shop decades after Morley had deliberately built his house around the tree it came from.

The timing felt strangely serendipitous. Here I was, preparing to launch a business built around telling the stories held in trees, and one of the most extraordinary slabs I'd ever seen was leaning against the beloved butcher shop I'd been visiting for years.

Preparing Morley for printing took more than twelve hours of sanding. Inking him takes roughly five times longer than most slabs in the Wooden Ink collection. And once the paper goes down, he's simply too large to print alone. Burnishing the entire surface and then carefully lifting a sheet nearly 40 inches across to reveal the impression is a two-person job.

But scale isn't the only thing Morley leaves behind on paper.

There are the rings — more than 80 of them.

There is a V-shaped drying check, formed as the enormous piece of wood lost moisture.

And then there are my favourites: two unusual fractures that run right through the thickness of the slab. When I flipped Morley over and followed them through the wood, their path suggested something different from ordinary drying checks. They appear to record the tremendous stresses the tree experienced when it was felled.

The moment this enormous tree came down may quite literally have left its mark on the print.

When I eventually showed the finished print to Morley, I think he loved it.

He also gave me another slab — one with a bit of local notoriety of its own. That's a story for another day.

I keep coming back to the family's idea of holding on to that great slab because they wanted to do something with it — something that would remember the tree.

It turns out, this was the something.

The very first print pulled from Morley went back to the Stephen family. I hope that when they look at it, they see far more than the rings of an old ash tree.

Nearly sixty years after Morley Stephen chose not to cut down an ash tree and instead built his home around it, that tree finally had to come down.

But a piece was saved.

And now it tells the story.