Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [10]
The downside of our method was that most of the trees Dad harvested were white pine, which has a burn rate roughly equivalent to Kleenex, so it took a mountain of slabs to keep the house warm. When it was time to “make wood,” as the common phrase had it, Dad rounded up the troops and took us to whichever corner of the farm the sawmill had been set up in last. Sometimes we all climbed in the back of the pickup; sometimes we rode on a hay wagon to which Dad had attached side racks. A certain glumness prevailed when we were in the hay wagon because it was much larger than the pickup, and we were anticipating a marathon. While Dad was gassing up his saw, we kids began stacking slabs in a pair of sawbucks that cradled the wood in a bundle. With one side barky and one side rough-sawn, one end fat and one end knife-skinny (or thin in the middle so they snapped in two mid-lift), the slabs were splintery, unbalanced, and a hassle to handle. Yanking them from the every-which-way pile was like playing full-contact jackstraws. At Christmas, when we went to the city and stood on the carpet of Grandpa’s split-level ranch and watched him fill the fireplace with uniform cylinders of papery-smooth white birch, I remember feeling what can only be described as firewood envy.
Back and forth we went between the sawbucks, alternately filling and emptying them as Dad ran the saw nonstop. We slung the chunks into the wagon or truck bed, stopping now and then to peer hopefully over the side racks. It seemed ages before Dad killed the saw, helped throw the last batch aboard and headed for the house. But the work had barely begun—the wood had yet to be unloaded and stacked in the basement. In later years Dad built a wood chute, but we used to just pull open a window and fling the wood through the opening. When we finished, the sill was battered and busted, and the window had to be held in place with a bent nail. Finally, we stacked the wood, often by increments after school. By the time the first snow fell, the basement was a warren of wooded corridors leading to the root cellar, chest freezer, and sump pump.
The penultimate step in the slab wood journey was the wood box—a large antique crate positioned directly adjacent to the solid Monarch. Once the wood had been stacked in the basement it came back upstairs one armload at a time over winter. By the time you made it upstairs, your biceps were aching and it was a relief to hear the noisy tumble of firewood spilling into the crate. It took a lot of trips to fill the wood box, but the following morning when we raced each other for the stove door, we had in some measure earned the warmth on our hindquarters.
Now that we have moved to the farm, poor Amy has come to understand this dynamic all too clearly. One of her daily wintertime tasks includes making the long trudge to the old granary across the yard where the dry wood is stored. Watching her load up her purple plastic sled and drag it slowly back to the house, I smile, remembering all the times Dad pried me from behind a Louis L’Amour cowboy book to do the same. More often than not, she goes willingly, if not gladly. If she sulks or fusses, I launch into an eye-glazing sermon, reminding her of how many times I have found her curled up in front of the stove with Dora the Explorer, and do you know where that warmth comes from, and let me tell you when I was little we had to go all the way out on the back forty to get wagonloads of wood, and, well, on and on it goes until Anneliese gives me the look normally delivered from the front pew by the wives of long-winded preachers, at which point I stalk off in a cloud of my own oration.