I used to live in a house in a Virginia. For three winters we had only a woodstove for heat. I learned some things in that time. Good logs are dense and dry. Locust is a great firewood. When you chop your own wood, haul it inside, load up the woodstove every night, empty the ashes every few days- you begin to understand a thing, to know what it is what its' capacity is.
Also understand its transitory ability. That is, it can be left in the damp wild, and it will rot slowly in layers, giving itself to the insects, until it is itself indiscernible from soil. It becomes a richness in this way. A cyclical offering.
On the other hand, we can will ourselves upon it with great conviction. To command upon it order. First in the great felling, then crosswise into rounds. It came to the house in that way, rounds. Manually with ax and maul we broke it down to useable bits. It was in the doing, understand? In the chopping, we understood what was needed in that pure primordial way. Not simply by sight, but by your wet hot insides, what it is to be warm. And conversely what it is to be cold, or freezing rather.
To feel that feeling is to know how much wood to chop. How much will last you until morning. Until morning- a once jammed up tight iron box, who raged with great satisfaction and a greater fury, that by protracting could be made to last the long night until morning was now dust. In a matter of hours, what otherwise takes seasons or centuries to powder, dusted.
We wasted little. In fact we often ran out of the great locust, or the impenetrable hickory, and were left with the soft crumbly stuff, that is dusted long before morning.
Ironically that great cold house is gone now. Mechanically dissected and exterminated. I want very much to draw some sort of parallel or make some statement about the house and the trees coming down, but I just cant.
©2010 Eli Simon
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