Just as another family’s loss gave Lilah the gift of life, North Texas woodworkers wanted to bring purpose to the loss of what was the oldest North Texas tree.
DALLAS — A 2-year-old girl and a 500-year-old tree might not seem to have much in common. But thanks to a devoted group of volunteer woodworkers, she and other children like her have a few more places to hold on to their courage.
OK, here’s the explanation.
We’ll start with children like Lilah Gunn, the aforementioned 2-year-old who, by every measure, has had a challenging first few years of life.
“It was at the 20-week ultrasound that we saw the heart defect,” her mom Nita told me. It was a heart defect whose only solution was a heart transplant, a gift of life from another family that had suffered their own unspeakable loss.
The transplant happened at Children’s Health in Dallas when Lilah was 8 months old.
“Her first year she went through more hard things than most people will go through in their entire lives,” Nita Gunn said.
But along with all the medical marvels that saved Lilah, there is also a woodshop in Richardson.
“I’m a self-taught, YouTube taught woodworker,” said Bodie Pyndus as he busied himself in a workshop at First United Methodist Church of Rich ardson. They call themselves the Sawdust Brothers.
But as a member of the North Texas Woodworkers Association, he wanted to talk about a few very old pieces of wood.
It was called the Quadri/Quincentennial Bur Oak. It was more than 90 feet tall and 500 years old when it fell in Plano’s Bob Woodruff Park in 2023.
For an arborist, it was a horrible day.
“And to see your favorite tree laying on the ground, I’m in mourning. I don’t know how to describe it,” arborist Steve Houser told us at the time.
But in that sense of mourning, woodworkers wanted to create something useful. Just as another family’s loss gave Lilah the gift of life, the woodworkers wanted to bring purpose to the loss of what was the oldest North Texas tree.
The North Texas Woodworkers Association, a group of hobbyists and part-time tinkerers, crafted dozens of jewelry boxes, all shapes and sizes, from the wood of the Bur Oak. And they did it for a very specific cause.
“Some of the children over the course of their stay they may get 500 to 1,000 beads,” said Pyndus.
Plastic beads of every color, shape, and size from the Beads of Courage program at Children’s Health. The beads mark every treatment, every milestone, every medical miracle. The children and their parents thread them into bracelets and necklaces to mark their victories during treatment.
“There’s no time to process in the moment,” said Lilah’s dad, Toby Gunn, of the difficult times during their hospital stays. “You’re just going from crisis to crisis. So having that memento to look back on his really nice.”
“Look at all the things she went through. Look at all of these beads. And look at her now,” Nita Gunn said.
The North Texas Woodworkers have been creating these special Beads of Courage boxes for years. Now, with the wood of a once-celebrated old tree, they are creating as many additional Beads of Courage bur oak boxes as they possibly can.
“They do this on their own time, spend their own money, and that’s just amazing to me,” said North Texas Woodworkers Association member Ed Horn.
“To be able to give back to the parents going through this traumatic time in the life of their children,” added Pyndus. “To have a little bit of encouragement that they will come out the other side.”
And Bodie Pyndus, who shares videos of his woodworking techniques, does this for one more reason.
“And about the time I was making the videos, my grandson was diagnosed with leukemia,” he said of a grandson who was successfully treated at Children’s Health.
“So I made him his own Beads of Courage box,” Pyndus said.
As for Lilah, she’s too young to know what that hand-crafted box and those beads really mean. But someday, Mom and Dad will tell her.
“She’s doing amazing. She’s doing better than we ever thought she would do,” Nita Gunn said. “It’s very cliche in parenting, oh, you enjoy every day and cherish every moment. But like we really do. Because we didn’t know we would have these moments.”
These are moments of courage children will get to hold onto forever, partly thanks to one very old still-giving tree.
