“No, we don’t need to borrow your log splitter.”
Log splitters are yuppie indulgences, I’d thought, against the founding principles of Cooter Hollow, I’d thought. Axes and splitting mauls, that’s what we need.
Of course, the reality of me with an axe involves knocking a log around, maybe peeling some bark off it, and giving the toenails a VERY close shave. And then, after about half an hour, maybe I’d get through the log, and leave the rest for S. For all my insistence, the biceps of my dreams just weren’t making their way into reality.
So, with a pile of unsplit firewood the size of a southern army, we borrowed the log splitter, towed it down the road in a great act of illegal bad banditry and hauled it up to Cooter Hollow.
A confession: I had never actually SEEN a wood splitter in action, but I had some idea, or so I thought, of how it worked. Based on looks alone (and not motion), there’s evidence of pistons, lots of sharp protuberant edges, and I had imagined some sort of mini-guillotine: explosions, violence, and the sort of carelessness that leads people turning up at their local pourhouse with their nubs of forgotten fingers newly stitched together.
But have you ever SEEN a log splitter in action? It’s graceful and elegant and rhythmic, and dare I say it, sexy? I dare: it’s sexy. And, for the love of the mythical creator of your choice, it takes three part-time days to split two years’ of wood into splinter-free perfection.
Which doesn’t mean I’d actually WANT one. There’s still a nag on my right shoulder whispering some nonsense about shortcuts and yupping out, but fortunately, my left hook is not bad, and I popped it it the nagging yap. Because our wood is split. Now to find the magical machine to stack it all.
if it stacked the wood too, that would be like a ‘weedless’ garden.