Wood Hertz

Typing these words hurts me, and I’m not speaking in metaphors or about my feelings. The tips of my fingers, with every letter pressed, hurt. Ow. Hurt. Ow. I could go on, but that’d be masochism.

Ow.

One winter day of my unforgiving childhood, I was asked to help my mother bring in wood for the wood stove. We lived in a climate and an era where snow was unexpected, so when a few inches were on the ground, we didn’t know how to navigate through them. So, we slid on whatever excuse we had for boots at the time, and grabbed the red wagon we always used for wood-hauling, filled it up, and on the way back to the house, my mother pulled from the front while I pushed from behind.

Little red wagons of the 1980s (yes, I’m old. Piss off.) weren’t the best tools for this job even for wagons and roads of great condition, so our well-battered box on a snowy trail was a chore, and I was really leaning on it, feeling it in the pancreas, when I looked up to see my mother’s hands bloodied from her own effort. Two revelations struck at that moment: one, she was willing to go through what at the time seemed tremendous pain to keep her clan warm. And two, I was not going to meet the same fate. I would study and perform well and become well-educated and Gatsby the fuck away from that future.

So I did. I moved to the center of the universe and attended a reputable university and got a well-paying job in a respectable industry until, at some point decided that wage slavery was worse than scratched-up hands, so I slowly began to pedal away from it until I met the Native, who convinced me to shit in a hole with him in the snowy woods.

So, ow.

I moved a year’s worth of firewood today, because it had been sitting upon a space I want excavated into a terrace for a new garden. And tomorrow begins the biennial excavator rental, which will hopefully catalyze many fine projects that lead to a resurgence of fodder for this inconsistent bit of bloggerel, and as much as I had been hoping for an alternate outcome, the wood pile did not, elas, move itself.

And so I have so many splinters in my hands at the moment that, if extracted, could probably start a woodstove fire of their own. Ow.

On the other hand, if I’m anything but steel-solid biceptually after this, I’m going back to desk jockeying.

(I’d have shared a photo of the pile, but this millipede found within is much cuter.)