Recursive - Jan 5 2022

 

Recursive

Jan 5 2022

Splitting wood

you develop an eye for the grain;

a single swing of the axe

a clean easy cut.

The thud of steel on birch.

The clunk of wood

falling to the floor.

The crunch, as I haul it through the snow

from the detached garage

to the big yellow box

by the front door.

There is something comforting

in a mindless job like this.

The repetition of a simple task.

The distraction

from my deep and troubling thoughts.

The virtue of work,

and the invigorating feel

of hard physical labour.

But above all

the satisfaction of plenty;

a full box

well-prepared for winter.

The stove is soporific,

a furnace

pouring out heat

you'd think could smelt steel.

The hard wood burns slow,

its warm orange glow

suffusing the room.

A tree, that took 50 years to grow

converting sunlight to matter,

consumed

in a few short hours.

I head outside

into the arctic cold

and see the box is close to empty.

The same routine

over and over,

like a milk-horse

who could sleep through its route

stopping at all the right doors.

The woodpile gets low.

The garage floor

is littered with splinters and bark.

And in the dark and brooding forest

all the trees are standing dormant,

already set

for the next incarnation of spring.

My furnace has been out for almost 2 weeks. Meanwhile, it's been unseasonably cold. (As I do the final edit a couple of weeks later, I can now report that it in fact turned out to be exactly 3 weeks until the oil burner got replaced.)

Heating with wood has its satisfactions: despite the work, and despite how it requires your presence.

There is comfort in the routine, as well as a kind of pendulum sense of extremes: from too hot to too cold (it's hard to regulate wood heat); from reassuringly full and the smugness of plenty, to alarmingly empty; from work, to soporific drifting in the woodstove's glow. All of it recursive, and contained within concentric spheres of recursion.