Island Life: Time to Split

Late one evening last winter, a tree fell down behind our house. It was at the edge of the back meadow, and had been ailing, though that had not yet been apparent to us.

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Weirdly, although that meadow is RIGHT under our bedroom window (the photo on the left was in fact taken through that window), and we had just gone to bed about five minutes earlier, we didn’t even hear the tree fall. Mark’s mom was staying with us then–in the guest bedroom on the first floor, beneath our bedroom–and she certainly heard it. She got up and wandered all around the dark house, trying to figure out what large thing had fallen over, in the kitchen maybe.

It was only the next morning when it got light that we all realized, Ohhh. Not inside. Outside.

Fortunately, and kind of amazingly, it didn’t hit anything important on its way down. It missed the house; it missed the fences and the gates; it missed some lovely large maple trees, and a tiny Japanese maple we planted and have been carefully tending since we moved here. It skimmed a few branches out of its neighbor, a spindly fir tree, and then it landed very politely (if loudly) (or so I’m told) in the open meadow.

Huh, we said. Look at that. We should do something about that.

Time passed. I mean, it was winter; it wasn’t in the way of anything. No rush.

This last spring, we had the guy who sells us firewood come over to take another tree down, and to buck both trees into rounds, which Mark could then later chop into firewood.

It’s very satisfying, to grow one’s own firewood. I say this as the person who does not do the chopping-up of the stuff. Though Mark insists he enjoys chopping wood.

Neither of these trees were going to be sufficient for our needs this winter. The first because it’s not big enough; the second because it won’t be seasoned enough till probably the end of winter. So we also told our firewood guy that we’d need another few cords from him.

“Sure,” he said. “You’re on the list.”

Time passed. We saw our firewood guy around, mentioned, a few times, our desire for a few cords of wood.

“Sure,” he assured us. “You’re on the list.”

These last few weeks, summer has turned abruptly to Wow look at all that rain. And also, not coincidentally, Brr. We started building fires, which is the way we heat our house. Our already skimpy firewood supply dwindled, and dwindled further, and further.

We didn’t want to keep pestering our firewood guy…we were on the list, after all, and he’s very busy (and he’s not even really a firewood guy, he’s a general contractor and he does firewood on the side, for friends, when he has time), so Mark went out to start chopping up those rounds, the ones from the deadfall tree.

An hour or two later, he came back in and said, “Nope. We’re renting a splitter.”

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It was a fine and sunny day last Saturday, so we split. Splitted. Splittified. Splittery-split-splat. Boy howdy did we split.

Oh but first, we had to haul all those deadfall rounds out of the back meadow and over to the driveway where the splitter was. So it was into a wheelbarrow, up the meadow, around the pond, up the hill to the driveway, over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house…

Anyway that was excellent exercise. My FitBit informed me that I’d hit 10,000 steps before we’d even finished moving the rounds.

Then Mark fired up the splitter. Very loud! Very impressive! Very much easier (or so I’m told) than hand-shopping the wood! Though not, to be sure, without effort.

He paused periodically to gather the large disgusting beetle larvae that were colonizing the wood (and that had probably been responsible for the tree’s demise), and collect them in a container. Two reasons for this: 1) They eat wood, duh, so we didn’t want to bring them into the house; and 2) They are extraordinary fishing bait.

Neither of us currently fish, but our local friend G does. And surprise! It was G’s birthday last weekend. So Mark took him a fabulous birthday present.

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For my part, I collected up the split firewood and piled it all into a wheelbarrow and carted the wheelbarrow over to the firewood-stacking place. Again. And again. And again.

I ended the day with 20,569 steps (but who’s counting!). And sore all over. Whew! But we had a lovely large pile of wood, ready to be stacked as soon as this next spate of rain finishes up. This should be enough to see us through several months of daily fires–plenty of time to find another source for the rest of our winter’s supply.

“No need to pester our friend,” we kept telling each other. “Look at us, seeing to our own needs like this.”

The coda of this blog post was supposed to be, “And we didn’t even get to the rounds from the greener tree…

...so we’ve got some more splittin’ ahead of us...”

But while that is true, what actually happened, after Mark took the splitter back to the rental place and I took a shower and then he took a shower and then we were moaning around the house with every muscle aching and not an ounce of energy left in our bodies but feeling VERY proud of ourselves for our day’s work and all the self-sufficiency we’d displayed…what actually happened then, that very exact same evening, was that our friend the firewood guy called.

“Hey, ready for those cords now?”

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We’ve got some stackin‘ ahead of us.