In a Moving Way “Can I stack wood?” Ohin pipes up as he comes in the door from school yesterday. I turn to look at him, is this child my son, asking to work? I’m pleased as punch. “Sure honey, go ahead, I’ll help.” Something about stacking wood in the fall, it’s invigorating. It’s one of the many reasons I love to burn wood for warmth. I know it’s not the most environmentally friendly forms of warming oneself, but for all the other environmental “help” I pro-offer the world, I figure I’m allowed this infringement. I throw on my tattered old gym shoes and hit the huge pile of wood that Andy has split in the backyard. “I love stacking wood!” Ohin exclaims as he climbs the pile and starts chucking down pieces willy-nilly—king on the mountain! We build pillars on the ends to help support the wood by crisscrossing like sizes, a very clever method I recently learned from a friend of Andy’s. One would figure, since I was raised in a home that used wood heat, for as long as I can remember, that I would have already had knowledge of this little, but extremely effective technique for bracing the ends. It just goes to show that there is always more to learn in the world. The trees that swayed and moved and fell in the storms of early summer became the target of Andy’s growling, fall chain saw. I hear the revving of the motor from the packing shed as I collect more tomatoes for canning. He will use old Red—our rusted, old pick-up to move the wood near the house for splitting. The guts of the pick-up were pushed back up into its inner cavity yesterday. They were spilled out on the driveway for the last four weeks, waiting for the moments when the men of the property would have time to move them upward in their appropriate locations. The pick-up sparks to life. I arrive home just in time to hear the old beast fire up. Our compost hauling, wood moving, straw bale carrying, snow pushing, red-rusted beast is back in business and, thankfully, we will no longer have to suck fumes in the cabin. This was not pleasant, especially when carrying a small child—the windows rolled all the way down so that we could breathe, then half our gasoline always spilling out onto the driveway, too many dollar bills rolling around and blowing away. Too many oil wells pumping black goo up to the surface of the earth, chugging and moving and refining goo to goods of their many carbon-chain lengths, to allow it to spill any longer. Did you know that more oil gets moved to plastics than any other oil product on earth today? Competition for the gas that spilled out on my driveway—I figure every time I settle for a vanilla frapucchino in it’s glass container instead of the pure fruit juice in the plastic bottle that I would prefer to drink, when I’m out of water in my mason jar at the gas station, I am causing gas prices to move down one, big, fat, cent! (I dream). And I think, “if ten more people did something like this everyday we could move the earth, and move the oil prices back down where they should be. Then I think about all the plastic bags moving and blowing across the earth. If we all just forewent the plastic bag, we could stop choking the ocean fish moving through the currents of the sea. The fish are literally being bagged! Maeve, in her little mis-matching gloves hauls her little chunk of wood over to the pile, I watch her as I move in my silent ruminations of stacking. She, amazingly, fits it neatly into the center of the pillar I’m building. We’ve moved a portion of the pile into a neatly stacked row against the fence line. It hardly looks like we made a dent into that big pile of split wood. We have a lot more work ahead of us, but now it’s off to dinner and then violin lessons. We plunk our work gloves into the basket next to the back door and look back at our stack of wood and think, there’s a moving way about the world, from disorganization and chaos to neatness and organization and I think, maybe someday we will achieve that sameness with our energy consumption, be it oil or wood. We will create something that doesn’t mess up the earth, until then we will keep going in a moving way.
Posted on: Thu, 03 Oct 2013 20:50:58 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015