Firewood

Collecting firewood was one of the Neanderthals favorite activities. After a long night of sleeping on fairly uncomfortable rocks they were always filled with joy when in the morning they got to leave their campsite in search of things to burn. This type of behavior was fine for a few hundred years ago, but in this day and age when coal is not even used to fuel the furnace, it simply does not make any practical sense. I am not a Neanderthal and as a non-Neander I also am not a fan of hunting and gathering, in other words I am an Anti Neander-Hunter-Gatherer, we even have our own bumper stickers. Even after making this point of my philosophy clear to my parents, they still insisted that I help with the family’s annual fall gathering of firewood, although they did allow me to keep my Anti Neander-Hunter-Gatherers club. I suppose that I should not complain about this amazing opportunity to help warm my home, after all it did bless me with several burns, cuts, bruises, calluses and muscles.
“Hold it still!” my dad yelled without looking up.
“I’m trying, I’m trying,” I attempted to reply to my dad’s command, but it wasn’t to be heard over the loud hum of the circular saw. I really was trying to hold the 2x4 steady, but I happened to not only have a fear of loud sounds, but of machines that could cut off my arm as well. My dad was strong and extremely capable of controlling dangerous power tools, but for some strange reason I still got nervous when my hand came only inches from a sharp, moving blade. Saturday mornings in the fall were always occupied by the same activity, cutting up pallets. Just like other kids I would rush to the front window when I heard my dad’s truck engine signaling his arrival home from work. Unlike other children, however I was not necessarily rushing to the window as a giddy schoolboy in anticipation of seeing my father. I was searching for something different; pallets. I was crossing my fingers hoping, praying that he would only have a few pallets in the back of his truck. On those all too often occasions when I saw the truck full of pallets, I knew that at least half of my Saturday would be eaten up in cutting and hauling firewood. My parents had a furnace installed in their home solely for cosmetic purposes, the beast had no functional purpose. In the 19 years that I lived in my parents’ home I never once remember the furnace being used for anything more than a good place to hang interesting magnets. My family did however own three wood burning stoves. These stoves were our sole source of heat for the winter. My father worked at ANR, a trucking company, and his company was always happy to give him all of the broken pallets that he wanted. This is one reason why my nighttime prayers always include a blessing on the pallets; that they would be whole, strengthened and not break.
After cutting the pallets, the hauling began. All of the boys who were of age, which meant that we were able to walk, were required to haul all of the cut up pieces of wood to the backyard. This was our penance for warmth during the winter. Even though the circular saw had been turned off, danger still loomed. Every Saturday at least one of the boys would run in to mom screaming because they had a splinter the size of a beam protruding out of one of their fingers. Unless this injury happened to occur towards the end of the wood’s migration to the backyard, we were always expected to return. The splinters were not the scariest part of this child labor. The journey to the backyard included a perilous “squeeze” between my dad’s two prize trucks a 1974 Chevy with a custom paint job (no scratches) and a light blue 1952 Heavy Chevy. I remember on more than one occasion losing my load of wood and hitting one of the two trucks. Even though the trucks were covered in multiple layers of blankets, the repercussions for such an act were, shall we say extremely “uncomfortable.”
After we had hauled all of the wood to the wood pile it was time to clean up the mounds and mounds of sawdust. I would grab the broom and one of my brothers would grab our “pooper scooper” shovel and we would throw the sawdust over the garden. To this day when I see the scars on my fingers and forearms I remember those cold winter days huddled in front of a warm fire and sipping my mom’s extra creamy homemade hot chocolate.
“Now aren’t you glad that you helped your father today. Without the wood you kids would be freezing?” my mom asked.
“We do have something called a furnace,” I grumbled. “Then we could actually be warm in all parts of our house and we could stop using my bedroom as an extra freezer.”
“You are being very ungrateful, what do you think we would do with the cow that we had the butcher cut up without the extra freezer space?”
When it came right down to it I knew my mother was right, frostbite was much better than starvation.