“A softer wind tonight, and as I raise my axe to try my luck at splitting, it blows my hair all around my face, which feels good. Muscle memory brings the swing down, knees bending to straighten the blow. Then the crack, as the maple flies apart, in two smaller chunks. I’m learning my wood stoves, and what it will take to keep them fed. Up at the yurt, my Vermont Castings “Aspen” (oddly, not our local version of poplar), is doing a bang up job, warming guests on a ski tour of the nobs, ravines & peaks surrounding French Settlement. But, it’s a haul, to hand deliver sled-fulls of fuel, an upward climb, either icy or muddy without benefit of snow. Maybe this summer, after things dry out, I’ll be able to drive the truck up, and get ahead of it. I don’t quite have this down yet. I’d say none of it matters enough, to ruin a day. Not with peepers chiming from the ditches, and sun on the back porch for sitting, and friends dropping by, including a story teller with a tall tale who brought a chocolate bar, & another who left a phone number for the next time I get accidentally locked in my outbuildings. Then, mostly, long hours of outdoor work. Re-tagging fruit trees, replacing an ugly orange surveyor’s tape, with a more subtle pink one. Collecting plastic sheeting blown around the yard. It was epic to find one of my boundary pins, one I’d never known about. I gave it a tiny, pink band as well. Then I found the birch knoll. As with most of my adventures, I stumbled into it, raspberry thorns grabbing my jeans, granite & quartz outcroppings tripping me, rotting stumps and logs left to rot, slowing me down, to a paralyzed moment of recognition. Closer to the river, the location had a hold suddenly, a firm grip, to my heart. I don’t take that too lightly. And I don’t know why it happens. A stand of older trees, seemingly staged for an event, and you’re it. I call it church, perhaps the only church I ever attend in which I feel fully reverent. Not shamed by some ambiguous inadequacy, or feeling phony. Yellow birches, sturdier than the delicate whites, at home around boulders and random scree. Overlooking, a road, a way, a path and a bridge. Is it possible to be proud of a road? I think so. When I heard my road had possibly been the original hard-going over the mountain, I felt awe. Across from my acres, the remnants of the old blacksmith shop, because you’d need help to get your teams over this gap, safely, back in those days. So, I don’t mind so much pulling a few sleds, or stripping down to a tee shirt to keep up with my axe, with that chill wafting off the forest glades, and the thawing cold chases of water, talking to me, non-stop. I reorganized the other wood pile too, by the cottage, so it would look nicer, and not so ghetto. Winter will do that, make a mess of the yard. What you do or don’t do when you’re freezing and exhausted is excusable in the spring for the most part. I was just lucky to make it through. Some didn’t. Which makes the month of April cataclysmic Every day is so important, on the map of survival. The brilliant, yellow coltsfoot, boldly blooming despite death, or despair, or dysfunction. Neighbors met on the road, or seen with their dogs, or reportedly dealing with bears. It all comes out in the wash. I wander around in spring, in a daze. Wondering if anyone can see me. Wandering around, in a daze.”
