More Wood

Three loads in three days, excellent, and today's is red oak, deep winter wood. Need to spend a couple of hours at the museum tomorrow, so another load. Town birds are different than country birds. The Kroger parking lot birds are completely fearless and are grown stupid. On the way back home a bitch dog in heat and there's a snarling jumble of males blocking Mackletree. They won't move, even as I nudge them with the truck, and I have to wait until they move their orgy into the grader ditch. Spring. Almost always cut down dead trees, not used to lifting and carrying green wood, especially not when the sap is up, probably lose 50% of their weight in drying, sometimes more than a gallon of liquid in a cubic foot of hard wood, cut this time of year. Use a muscle group I haven't used in a few months, sore shoulders. Some red maple base cuts at the dump sight, one of them, I calculate, weighs nearly a thousand pounds, and it's only four feet long. I covet it. Maybe I can split it there, maple splits nicely but base cuts are notoriously difficult in any species. Make a good sculpture blank. There's a boat winch at the museum, so if I built in a stayed and welded winching post just behind the cab of the truck, and had a ramp and some rollers, I could harvest these large pieces that generally go begging, because they are too big to move, for the usual two guys in a pickup truck. There's a nice breeze, the leaves are still limber, the green is close around my house and everything dances. I keep a young maple outside my writing window, as wind-sock and barometer. One thing is as good as another. You can barely light your way, with, dissipating to nothing, the lights we have, a hallway that goes on forever. Like a dream. Sunday talk with Mom, we laugh about my failures and share a few recipes. She's in pain and Dad can hardly move, but we can still joke about almost everything. Dad remembers a fishing trip when the big one got away. I know the trip he means, I miss-played a large bass and ended up with nothing but a back-lash. When I get off the phone, I think I've mostly failed. A few things I've gotten right, but generally not. Life is mostly a history of failures. Stress failure analysis. You learn from your mistakes, and if you don't die outright, you fix breakfast and get on with the day. I'm almost completely pole-axed but still welcome tomorrow as a new day. I feel I should be depressed, but I'm not, I welcome the challenge. Fuck a bunch of failures, I still might get something right. A fleeting thing. Whatever. Sure, more wood is a positive thing, next winter, the row you hoe. Listen, I've given up on almost everything but I still engage the natural world, those crows seem to say something.