Getting Ready For Winter

As I write this tonight, my arm muscles are still twitching from the trauma. I was splitting wood this weekend, getting our firewood stack ready for the winter. Our woodpile, hidden behind two small maples in front of our house in Connecticut, has blackened, three-year-old wood. That’s where I started.

I carted one twelve-pound, double-faced sledgehammer to the woodpile. I have two, one is newer, and from the second, the one in my hand, the hickory had split just below the head. I taped it last year with duct tape, and it seemed to be holding. The newer one’s my backup. I also carried two two-pound black metal wedges. I made a second trip to the garage, for my Husqvarna chainsaw.

We need to burn aggressively this year. Already I have two dead trees on our property that will soon be added to our woodpile. We have two fireplaces and a wood-burning stove, and there’s nothing more sublime than the fall display of colors in Litchfield County and the smell of fireplaces keeping homes warm in rural Connecticut. It takes you back in time. It instantly transports you to the antithesis of the City. It saves on heating bills.

I removed the green tarps covering my woodpile, starting with the oldest wood. I know when and where each pile of logs was placed every year. I rolled old massive oak stumps, which had already been cut when we bought our property years ago. As I split these stumps, using the two wedges simultaneously and bringing the sledgehammer alternately on each wedge, the crack of the wood revealed a nest of termites. Hundreds of them. Two of the old stumps were contaminated, and I wouldn’t bring them into the garage, even though I sorely wanted to incinerate the vermin. I rolled the split, contaminated stumps away from the woodpile, into the forest, and let the termites have their feast.

The rest of the wood was termite free. I held a wedge on the flat wood, smashed it hard with the sledgehammer, avoiding pulverizing my wrist or fingers. Once the wedge stuck, I lifted the sledgehammer overhead, and brought it down on the wedge, often imagining the face of a critic or nemesis, literary and political, as the wedge. The adrenalin flowed, and I didn’t feel my muscles twitching until hours later. For each log, for each split (thick logs need to be quartered, instead of just halved), three, four, five times I brought the hammer down. It’s like lifting weights and doing squats at the same time. You feel it in your shoulders, arms, and legs, as you split the logs, carry them to the pile to go into the garage, over and over again.

My trusty chainsaw? I used it to cut longer logs in half. It’s a machine you need to pay attention to, lest you lose a finger or a toe. It’s a blast of noise in the quiet forest, and I prefer hearing the crack of split wood, but you need the machine once in a while. The chainsaw also determined when I stopped. When I became too tired and my muscles and reflexes stopped responding as they should, that’s when it was time to call it a day, before I made a bloody mistake.

Some people might think it’s crazy to spend a significant part of your weekend doing this kind of work. You can certainly pay somebody else to do it. Or you can drive to a supermarket and buy neat, shrink-wrapped piles of wood. My wife Laura has threatened to buy me a wood-splitter, but so far I have resisted. I like connecting with the wood. I like the exercise and being outside. I like doing things for myself, instead of being separated from what I need and what I need to do to achieve it. I’m not about to slaughter my own chickens, but I will split my own wood. Writing itself already separates me from the world; I don’t need another activity to divorce myself from preparing for the turn of the seasons.

Planting Apple Trees

I find the simplest things the most rewarding. Is that a sign I am becoming wise, or just getting old? This weekend Laura, the kids and I were in the Litchfield Hills. Laura was busy in her garden; she’s inherited her green thumb from her father. On rainy Saturday, we drove to the Kent True Value Hardware store to get eight bags of cedar mulch for Laura’s two flower gardens.

I wanted to take a look at apple trees, which we had thought about planting last year but didn’t because we were too busy. We drove down the road a few minutes to Kent Greenhouse & Gardens. It was almost closing time, but we managed to find Cortland and Royal Gala apple trees, which we liked, and you need at least two so they can pollinate each other. But we left without a purchase in part to get out of the rain.

The rest of that dark, wet Saturday we spent indoors. I read Salman Rushie’s Midnight's Children, and have particularly enjoyed the Padma character, whom the narrator interacts with as he tells the story of the birth and rise of free India. I also edited a novel I have been working on, despite fighting an awful cold/flu which seemed to get worse as the night progressed. By the time I collapsed on the bed, I couldn’t inhale even the slightest whiff from my nose, and I wondered if I would be able to get up the next morning. I dreamed of chasing an apple cart through my version of New Delhi (I’ve never been there), and was the last to rise out of bed the next morning, still exhausted and my head in a fog.

One thing was clear to me on Sunday: I wanted to plant those apple trees. Laura was reluctant because she was busy with other garden chores, but I got her to put fluorescent orange parking cones in spots we thought the apple trees might go. I have my ways. So throughout the day, we watched what spots received the most sun, which were shaded by trees in and around our property, and which still seemed to be ideal, after a few hours of imaging a plethora of apples on the trees and ground.

The hour was getting late on Sunday afternoon, but I enlisted my son Aaron, who also loves apples, and got Laura to drive him to Kent Greenhouse to pick the apple trees they liked while I started digging the holes. The first hole was almost done by the time they returned, and I had to pry out a few large mica rocks embedded in the soil. The Litchfield Hills was long ago a mining area and known as the arsenal of the American Revolution, providing the iron ore for General George Washington’s cannons.

As Aaron and I worked to finish the first hole, I pushed and shoved at one last rock at the bottom, and the old wooden shovel, which I had found in the forest three years ago, snapped in two. So this time, I returned to Kent True Value Hardware, but the store was closed. I drove to Kent Greenhouse (that’s three times in one weekend!), and bought their fancy, ergonomic stainless steel shovel. By the time I returned, Aaron had nearly finished the second hole with the small spade.

We finished planting the apple trees, mixing the planting soil from Kent Greenhouse with the soil we had dug up. Aaron went back to his homework. I cleaned up the area, and raked and shoveled away the excess soil, and watered our new apple trees. I realized I was sweaty and exhausted, my pants were filthy, and my fingernails were black with grime. But I could not have had a more satisfying weekend this early spring.