LumberJack Me

The last few weeks have been a hustle and bustle to get firewood for the winter. Whit and I played all summer and didn’t even think about getting wood till the first of September when it started cooling down. Last year we ran out of wood and had to borrow some from my parents. So this year we’ve made it a point to go a lot. Every Friday and Saturday of the last month or so has been spent up on the mountain cutting down trees, dicing them up, loading the trailer, driving home, and unloading the trailer just to start the whole process over again the next day. The whole “getting wood” cycle is really starting to get old for me. I do enjoy and count it as a workout lifting logs that weigh as much as small houses, but when Whit comes home, all I really feel like doing is relaxing. When the alarm goes off the morning of another wood cutting adventure I find myself wanting to burrow down in the little cocoon of blankets I’m in, and sleep till spring. I often think about how great it would be to be a bear during the long winter months, not having to worry about waking up at 6:30 on a Saturday morning, how much I eat, or shaving my legs. But when the alarm goes off, spite my body’s constant nagging and complaints, I get up out of my warm and cozy bed to work alongside my husband no matter the weather. I would NEVER expect Whit to do it alone, and I guess a little manual labor is good for everybody.

I don’t know what it is with men, but you give them a chainsaw and suddenly their testosterone hits the ceiling. My father and husband are the worst culprits. There’s nothing they love more than falling a tree and listening to it crash as it hits the earth. As the trunk starts to crack you’ll hear one of them scream “THERE SHE GOES!” (I guess all trees are girls) and then the rumble of the earth as it hits the ground. When it’s down you hear hips and hollers such as, “WOOHOO!”, “TAKE THAT!”, “THAT ONE WAS BIG!”, and “THERE SHE BE!”. You have to be careful being the one that hauls the wood to the trailer because you never know when a tree they are cutting down just might be leaning your direction. If one of the tree’s they’re cutting down happens to get caught in a neighboring tree, heaven forbid they move onto a tree less likely to get stuck. Oh no, it has now become a challenge and if they have to, they will spend all day getting that tree on the ground.

We have quite the wood pile in our backyard now. Yesterday, I spent a good 3 hours stacking it. As we’ve gotten home the last few weeks, we haven’t had time to take it off the trailer and neatly put it away. So we’ve just thrown it in a huge pile behind our cinder block wall. So yesterday I took on the task of putting it in a nice pile. A lot of it still needs to be split, but at least we have some wood to burn now. Whit and I try to look at our firewood as part of our food storage. If times get tough and we can’t afford to run the furnace. We will still be warm thanks to our fireplace and the hell we go through to get a nice big stack of wood in the fall.

After 3 hours of stacking, I'm only half done!