Más madera

“Más madera” brings a phrase of accumulation into a story where wood is at once sensory comfort, industrial commodity, and the material of a new beginning. Across the passages associated with the heading, its meaning gathers around Bea’s movement from grief toward action and around the treehouse project that gives her that action a form.

The Expression and Its Narrative Movement

The heading sits between an intimate exchange and Bea’s account of a difficult period of mourning. She describes two days in an emotional abyss, during which her family cannot find a way to help; even her father’s daily Skype calls miss their mark. On the third day, exhausted, she ends the impasse by going into her brother’s room and proposing that they get drunk. In this placement, “Más madera” frames a shift from grief’s stasis toward renewed activity. The later scenes make that movement concrete: wood becomes something to seek out, assess, transport, and build with.

Wood as Sensory and Industrial Material

When Bea persuades Débora to accompany her to the sawmill, she presents the visit as a practical necessity: the treehouse has a tight budget, and Débora is good at bargaining. The trip also takes her into a changed landscape. The biomass plant dwarfs the sawmill, while another, still larger facility is under construction nearby. Around the buildings, logs and vast piles of timber occupy an immense open yard, and a huge chipper spits out shredded wood. Bea imagines climbing the piles and sinking into them, and describes the smell of wood, sawdust, and even the steam from the biomass plant as pleasurable.

That response is not merely practical enthusiasm. Bea has gradually learned to distinguish woods by their source and has developed preferences for American beech, red pine, untreated oak, and yew. She believes different woods suit different spaces and even different moods; for her, visiting a sawmill is like a trip to an amusement park. The scene sets this personal, tactile attachment beside industrial scale: the same material that comforts her is stacked, processed, and tied to the expanding energy project.

From Plans to Construction

The treehouse turns the heading’s suggestion of more wood into a literal requirement. Bea loads her mother’s old van with the garage’s tools and equipment she has bought for the work: an angle grinder, compressor, toolbox, chainsaw, electric hammer, wood glue, sawhorses, two ladders, and parts for a small scaffold. Her parents’ furniture-restoration hobby has given her practical skills, and she carries printed plans, a three-dimensional project on her laptop, and notes gathered from comparable projects around the world. She feels ready to make an architectural idea concrete with her own hands.

Bea also imagines the build as a family undertaking that might bring them together and help heal their wounds. The enthusiasm meets an immediate logistical obstacle: the sawmill truck can bring the timber only to the nearest forest track, leaving the wood to be carried roughly three hundred metres to the chestnut tree. Jacobo has anticipated the problem and arranged for three Civil Guard colleagues to help. With León, Jacobo, the sawmill employee, and the officers carrying the pine lengths, the group gets the timber to the tree and stacks it there by the end of the morning. In this sequence, wood is no longer an image or a pleasure alone; it is a heavy shared burden and the first physical substance of Bea’s design.