I had this impressive stack of firewood delivered last June. My wood guy delivered the cut oak and dropped it in a pile at the top of my gravel driveway. To call it a stack isn’t fair, it was more a twisted mess of wood and sweat, random pieces so big that only a Paul Bunyan swung ax could reduce their size, other pieces barely slivers, easily carried off by a 10 and a 7 year old. This wood was to serve as fuel for my pizza oven, a pizza oven that succeeded in few things except making my face a bit puffier. We worked many hours to split and re-stack that wood, some of it making a temporary home under the pizza oven itself, the rest leaning lazily against the backside of my garage where no one would see it unless they looked.
Sometimes slowly, other times quickly, this wood was consumed by the oven. It takes an inordinate amount of wood to heat a brick pizza oven, and so I fed piece after piece, day after day, week after week, into this greedy nest of fire and smoke. Then, like all new things, the newness wore off. I still fire up the pizza oven now and again, but without any of the rookie zeal that I owned in June and July. The wood stack was thankful for my disinterest, and it held its size and its weight until last month when the wood was repurposed from food cooker into body and soul warmer. The wood is now brought into the house in great quantities, some positioned for a fireplace here, the rest stacked near the fireplace over there. That glorious full cord of wood, because face cords are for sissies, that was once so dark and deciduous and imposing, is losing the battle to my love of the sizzle and the crackle and the intoxicating smell of wood smoke.
Last Sunday, before the Bears game and while other agents were telling you how busy they were, I was in my still gravel driveway, splitting wood. I bought an ax in June, back when the large hunks of wood had to be sectioned into smaller chunks that would burn more easily and more quickly. I split quite a bit of wood in June. By July, I had lost the ax. I was convinced someone stole it. I accused many of the crime. I stared at my bedroom ceiling at night, wondering if the ax was in the hands of a man who stole it and is hiding out in my woods just waiting for the right time. I couldn’t find the ax for the life of me, so I bought another one in August. On the day that I bought the new ax that only perfectly resembled the old ax, my son walked from the woods with the old ax in his hands. He had been using it to “chop things” in the woods. I am either raising a future Renaissance man or your garden variety ax murderer. It’s too early to tell.
While we split wood on this past Sunday morning, I wondered how it would be to split this wood not for sport or for luxury, but for necessity. My son worked for a few minutes, gathering the split wood in his hands and delivering some to the pizza oven and the rest inside, and after ten minutes he announced that he was tired. He wondered aloud how much longer we would be doing this. I told him, in no uncertain terms, that the settlers had to split wood all day, at least one a month. I have no idea whether or not this is true, but it seems reasonable to me to schedule one day a month to spend splitting wood. He grumbled. We split some more. I thought of how much I enjoyed splitting wood, how natural it felt to bring in logs and cut them to use for heat, for cooking. I found myself again, as I have so many times over the last two or three years, wishing for a simpler life where splitting wood was the only thing on my agenda for one day a month.
Once the wood was split, there was a garden to be tilled. Not one to “celebrate” Halloween, I did still allow a few pumpkins and some ugly gords to grace the front stoop. Following the lead from the farmers, I threw those vegetables onto the garden ground, and mercilessly tilled them into the soil. I did the same with a few dozen ears of sweet corn that hadn’t been shucked and had, instead, been left outside as some sort of peace offering to any visitors who happened to be hungry enough to eat month old corn. I tilled the corn in to the garden too. Then I blew off the patio and I surveyed my yard. A year ago that yard was nothing but a mound of mud. Six months ago that yard was nothing but a recently cut hay field, scattered with some seed. On that Sunday, the yard looked strangely like a yard, the patio looked much like a patio, and my garden looked like a patch of dirt that could indeed support life. I had come a long ways.
But something didn’t feel right. I was as the rich man who toils for goods but still finds no peace. I looked over the property, felt secure in its readiness for the coming winter, and still felt empty. What was I missing? What was this fall urge that I was not fulfilling? I knew that I needed a chainsaw, and I have needed one for quite some time. I haven’t bought one because I’m waiting for some people to buy lake houses, but I have already located and acknowledged the hole in my soul that is waiting to be filled with as shiny, orange chainsaw. No, that wasn’t it. The wood was split and stacked, the garden tilled, the grass cut short for the last time, the patio blown off, the driveway dragged with a box scraper to make it mimic a true driveway, but something was missing. I had been slowly caulking open joints around window trim that I never caulked in the spring, but that still wasn’t it. I was missing something, I felt empty. I searched my brain and my eyes searched my surroundings for some clue.
My property smelled like fall, like fresh split oak and freshly cut grass. The breeze was soft, the temperature surprisingly acceptable to my skin. I walked the drive, kicking some rogue pieces of gravel that looked more like giant chunks of lime rock. I knew the siding wasn’t on the front shed yet, but that couldn’t be helped today, and that wouldn’t fill this emptiness anyway. I looked across the street, where some neighbors that I’ve never met played in their lawn. Two of them were kicking a soccer ball. They looked like younger people, kids maybe. Two older people had something in their hands, working from one side of the lawn in unison, swinging their arms back and forth and back again. It was a dance, of sorts, choreographed by necessity. I couldn’t tell what they were doing.
I walked closer, but not so close as to invite conversation, because I do that for a living and don’t do it for the same reason that dentists don’t walk around their house on Sunday drilling on strangers’ teeth. At once I saw what they were doing, and I identified the hole in my fall routine. They were raking leaves, many, many leaves. Great piles of leaves. Elsewhere on the property, there was smoke rising from a pile. They were raking and burning and laughing and kids played soccer. I had done so many things this fall, but I hadn’t raked a single leaf, and I had burned so many oak trees this fall but I hadn’t burned a single oak leaf. I found the hole, and it looked a lot like a pile of leaves and it smelled a lot like a smoldering fire.
Fall is for gathering, and for hunting, and for preparing. But it’s also for raking and for burning, and while most yard chores are just that- chores- burning a pile of freshly rakes leaves on a November Sunday is something we should all make time for. If you live in a great city or a small suburb, and burning those leaves is banned, then I invite you to the lake. We have plenty of leaves here, plenty of matches, and plenty of time left to burn. Since I have a glaring absence of trees in my lawn areas, I plan to import some leaves from my woods. I’ll rake those leaves onto a tarp, drag the tarp into a safe place, and then burn those leaves if for no other reason than I always have, and I probably always will.