I’m typing rather than writing the first draft of this because I’m too weak to grip a pen.
It’s woodcutting day. The Wyoming poets always say firewood warms you twice: when you chop it and when you burn it.
Actually, if you forge into the wilds to cut your own, it warms you three times.
Firstborn was at a marching band practice this morning and couldn’t make the trip, which is a shame since he’s second in strength to The Husband only, and if he’d been along for the ride I could have stayed home and made sourdough as nature intended.
I am not built to lift heavy things. I exercise with little eight-pound dumbbells just so my autumn grocery run won’t kill me.
But I don’t want to freeze this winter, so I got into that truck with The Husband and our other three boys, whom we tricked into thinking that this would be super fun.
Hauling a flatbed trailer, we drove south on a grade. Lemon-hued aspen trees burst from the pines. The smoke of distant wildfires smothered the foliage and blurred the colors, making everything wooly around the edges.
Dead trees will burn one way or another.
Either they’ll linger with their betters and wait for a lightning strike, or a stray cigarette, or a bonfire’s ember to ignite them so they can blacken the mountainside and call into battle all the people God blessed with commonsense and heavy equipment.
Or, the dead trees will fall.
A Wyoming man of Scots-Irish descent will chainsaw them into 6-foot logs. Three little boys will swarm a log and drag it through the coffee-colored mountain dust to a trailer. With a grunt they’ll hoist it onto the platform and push it into a “snuggle” with the others.
Another log will roll onto my raw and scraped arms, bob over a bed of bark, and unroll, thudding, onto that same trailer, leaving me warm, sore, a little queasy.
As we worked I had to visualize my cozy fire to keep myself going. Don’t laugh: I’m a mother first, runner second. Lifter of anything heavier than a milk jug last.
And visualize I did. I thought of waking before 6 a.m. to a cold and dark house, with the snow-crusted hills outside flinging moonlight back to the heavens.
In my wood stove, the ashes are cool enough to touch. But if I turn them over with a strip of bark, one sly wedge of embers grins.
So do I.
The Husband says I’m no good at starting a fire from scratch, but I am the world’s best at reviving a fire on its deathbed.
It is precisely a dying fire’s desperation that gives it the will to live.
Fires are like people that way, I muse in the pre-dawn chill.
I reach for a newspaper.
My choice of career cannot be severed from the role that paper news plays in kindling fires.
I grew up with a woodstove, and have always known that if you have newspaper, you have the start of something life-saving.
These days I work for a digital news outlet instead of a paper one. But every time those silky pages leaf apart between my finger and thumb, I still feel how immense a gift it is to get one more day.
One more day to read a headline. One more day to crumble it up and burn it, like absolutely nothing it says can dampen my home’s warmth.
Meanwhile, back on the mountain, I snapped out of my winter flashbacks.
I tripped twice on crooked branches. Hauled two-and-a-half cords of wood with the boys while The Husband ran the chainsaw. When he noticed we couldn’t lift the massive “January logs” he cut, he’d turn off the chainsaw and carry them himself – over one shoulder, without even a grunt.
The boys’ jaws dropped.
We strapped down the load and trundled homeward. The Husband fretted over the truck brakes, sniffed the air, and munched Twizzlers, even though they taste like plastic for some reason.
I leaned back and let my esophagus decompress.
The children gaped at the guardrails between us and a sheer death-plunge down the mountain.
And in a moment of gratitude for the winter ahead I tried, and failed, to grip a pen.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
