Woodpile Man
New Pond 08/22/2011
This is your new blog post. Click here and start typing, or drag in elements from the top bar. I helped Daddy dig the pond And I helped him fill it with water. And then the best part… Going to pick out the fish! “Let’s get koi,” Daddy said. “They are so pretty and they get bigger every year.” “Koi!” I said. “Absolutely!” The pet shop had so many fish tanks. There were warm water fish, And saltwater fish, And cold water fish. “There they are,” Daddy said. “Koi are cold water fish!” Hundreds of koi were swimming side by side. Red and orange, white and black, yellow and silver. All the colors mixed in different ways. I picked out two koi; a black and white one and a red and black one. We took them home and put them in the pond. And they disappeared! “Where are they,” I asked. We threw food in the pond, but they didn’t come up to eat. I sat and watched for hours, but I never saw them. I went to the pond that night and looked with a flashlight, but I still couldn’t see them. “They lived with so many fish for so long. Maybe they are afraid of being alone,” Daddy said. “Maybe they are hiding.” Then I had an idea. “When I go to Mommy’s house this weekend, I'll ask her if I can bring back one of the big fish from her pond.” “How come?” Dad asked. “I think my new little fish need a guide. They don’t know what to do in our big pond. They are lost!” I told Mom about my new fish when I got to her house. I told her about my idea. She listened but she didn’t say anything. I figured that was a “no.” But when Daddy came to pick me up on Sunday Mom caught a big goldfish named Molly and put her in a bucket for me. And gave me a kiss. “Let me know what happens, okay?” she said. It was dark when we got home. We poured Molly right into the pond. And then I went to bed. When I woke up, I ran over to see the fish. I threw in some food. Molly came up. She ate. But the koi were still hiding. Before I ate lunch I went to the pond again and threw in some food. Molly rushed up and ate. The black and white koi came up too. And ate. And right behind him the red and black koi came up. They ate all the food so I threw in some more. They rushed over so fast the water splashed. They gulped and splashed until the food was gone. I told Daddy the koi were eating. He was happy too. “Call and tell Mom,” he said. So I called Mom and told her that Molly was a good guide, and now my fish are eating. “I can bring Molly back next weekend,” I said. “No, keep her,” Mom said. “I think your koi still need her. Maybe if you have koi babies some time, you can bring me one.” “Okay,” I said. “Love you Mom.” “I love you too baby. See you in a few more days.” Add Comment Animal Dream 08/22/2011
I had the best dream last night. There were all these animals in my room. Do you remember what kinds? Of course! There was a gray fox wrapped around my jewelry box. And there was a purple martin sipping juice from the aluminum carton. There was a sable half on and half off my night table, And baby apes were swinging on my window drapes! There was an alligator staying warm by the radiator, And a black and white skunk on the upper bunk! A rough-skinned newt climbed into my bathing suit And a couple of sandpipers nested in old baby diapers. Black bellied plovers flew out of my covers, And a hook billed kite perched on my light! Best of all was the armadillo – I saw him curled up right under my pillow! Truckload 03/30/2010
I tried buying a truck load of logs from this guy a couple of years ago. I had a call into him and even spoke to him I think, but the logs never came and I was able to get enough wood just by scrounging around and cutting a tree or two here and there when a friend needed a tree cut, so I didn't pursue the truck load. But near the end of this winter I decided I didn't want to leave refilling the new shed to chance, and I called the guy again and asked him to bring a load over. His name is Rick and he’s been logging for forever around here. His logging trucks go up and down my road pretty regularly, and I always wondered what it would be like to get a whole truck load of logs. This heating season is almost over, though we still need to have the fire going some days. Like today, it’s cold and rainy and we’ve been using the stove all day. But the big shed, the new shed, is almost empty and there is plenty of room to store new firewood. The old shed is full, and the wood in it has been drying for a year now. With that wood and the temporary shed I made in September next to it full of wood that I got from Ed’s land across the street (after the electric company cut down trees that were near their wires), I have enough fuel for the 2010/2011 winter. But now is the time to get the wood for the 2011/2012 winter, so it will be dry. The logs Rick brings are the tops of trees that are no good for cutting into boards. But even though they are just tops, they are about 20 feet long and thick enough to make me wonder if I could use some for tables or benches or beams. Anyway, Rick said he’d call before he came and he said he’d probably come Saturday. The Wednesday before Saturday I got home from work earlier than I thought I would. I was supposed to tutor a student who was out of school for a while, but when I got there, no one was home. I found out later that their car broke down and they were stuck in Kingston. Fran went to Kingston after work to shop, so no one would have been home when the phone rang at 3:30 if all had gone as it was supposed to. It was Rick, and he was in Kingston too, and he was all loaded up with logs, but the person who was supposed to get them changed his mind. The whole thing reeked of divine intervention. This was the load I was meant to have. “Be there in about half an hour,” Rick said. “I’ll be here,” I told him. When he pulled into the driveway, the truck dwarfed everything around it. The small house seemed even smaller, the driveway was inadequate, the electric wires coming to the house from the pole across the street had to be lifted higher with a long hickory stick I had stored in the bungalow. When Rick was parked where he could unload the wood near the shed, he jumped out of the truck and climbed up to the seat in back where the logs were, and he got the log grabber going and started grabbing logs and laying them down on the lawn. He worked fast. It was like he was told by god that if he wasn’t done in five minutes he’d spend the rest of his life in the rear of the Kerhonkson post office sorting mail. And he was finished in five minutes! Me, I took the pictures below and kind of grinned the whole time.    The Hooded Man Bluebird House 03/22/2010
Angela runs the 5th and 6th grade student council with Colleen and she asked me to build a bird house for student council to raffle off at their spaghetti dinner this Wednesday, 3/24/10. I looked around and didn't really have any nice pine left. I could have used some of the walnut I got years ago from Rick that he sawed at his own little mill. But then I remembered there were a bunch of cedar logs across the street at Ed's because when the electric company came to trim trees near the wires Ed asked if they could also cut down the dead cedar trees. One of the sawyers said he'd cut them down and asked Ed if he could have them for posts at his own house. Ed said "sure" but the guy never came to get them. They sat there all fall and all winter and now that it's spring, I went over and got a wheelbarrow full (with Ed's permission) of cedar for the birdhouse. (Actually, before winter got going, when it was clear that the guy was never coming to get them, I brought over some of the cedar logs that were about 12 feet long and put them in the bungalow for safe keeping.) Using the chain saw and a few other tools, I made a birdhouse to be raffled. I'm off now to get a pressure treated eight foot long 2X4 that I'll cut into two 2X2's by 8 feet and include one with the cedar house and use one for a post for a bird house at school. I'll make the posts shorter, of course, since a bluebird house shouldn't be too high off the ground.  Barrel full of wood from Ed's  Slicing the cedar into boards  Slicing  Falling slice  Saw and cedar: Shaping the birdhouse  Coming together  Its getting there  Almost done  Just needs to be mounted Chicks 03/02/2010
N lives with her parents up the road a mile, and about 3 years ago they had to have two huge maple trees in their front yard cut down because they were dying and would probably fall on the house in a storm. The trees were maybe two hundred years old. A man with a bucket lift came and cut the trees without doing any damage to the house, dropping all the big chunks of wood on the lawn. He said he would get rid of the wood for an additional $900.00, but they said that wouldn’t be necessary. I said I would be delighted to take the wood, and clean up the yard to boot, and in 90-plus-degree heat I went everyday and cut up the huge chunks until the two maples had been cut and split into pieces I could lift and bring to my house. N’s mom even let me use her pick-up truck to haul the wood. I had to make about 30 trips, and drink about 5 gallons of iced apple cider, but it was finally done. I didn’t have the woodshed that leans on the garage yet, so I piled the wood on the strip of land between the garage and the road and covered it with tarps. When the shed was done, 2 summers ago, I put all the wood inside it, and N’s maple was put in first. (See woodshed photos) By the time we got the Big Snow of 2010 (Feb 23 to Feb 27), a lot of the wood in the shed was gone, but there was still a bunch of N’s maple left. Most of it was still in big chunks that I knew I would rather split in the winter than in the heat of August when I brought the wood to my house. Thousands of homes lost power in the storm, but we were lucky. Our house and a few around us never lost electricity for more than about half an hour. N and her parents had power for the first few days of the storm, but then they went dark too. When I called to see how they were doing, N said they were okay except they had two “week old chicks” that her sister had brought over to her house because her sister had lost power almost as soon as the storm began. The chicks had to be kept warm, about 90 degrees F, with a heat lamp, or they would die. Now here’s the point: I told N that I could come and get the chicks, because I still had power, and even if my power went out, I could keep the chicks warm because I had the wood stove going. And yes, I was burning the maple from her yard. N’s power came on a day later and I brought the chicks back to her, but not before I took a few pictures of them, and Fran and I got to hold them.     Found Object 02/15/2010
Found Object One weekend in the fall of 2009, I decided it was time to build the doors for the old garage that the new woodshed was leaning against. The old door that was supposed to go up and down on tracks no longer went up or down. The whole bottom panel finally fell off, and with out it, it was impossible to get the door to roll down the tracks any more. Even if I could roll it down, the first panel would be missing and the whole bottom would be open. It would look crappy and it would let in the rain and snow. So when school started again in September I asked Lorry to ask her ex if he could saw me up some pine for 2 new doors. These doors would be on hinges and swing open and closed instead of rolling up and down. Lorry’s son brought over 12 of the most beautiful 1” by 12” by 10 ft pine boards I have ever seen. They were still warm from the saw slicing them. The boards were solid and pure white, except for large swirling knots that looked like dark amber embedded in the wood. Who am I, I wondered, to use such wood? I piled the boards with spacers between them so air could flow in on all sides and they could dry and they wouldn’t mildew or rot. I figured they would be pretty dry by the end of next spring. They would be lighter and easier to hang with hinges and there wouldn’t be large gaps between each vertical board. But after the leaves all fell and the door-less garage looked bleaker and uglier than ever, I started sawing the wood and nailing it together and I made two big doors. It was Saturday, early November. By Sunday I was hanging the doors with hinges I hoped weren’t too small (I couldn’t find bigger ones and I didn’t want to wait for the blacksmith to make bigger ones for me) and putting pull handles and a hasp and staple lock on them. Now, the heart of this little story is all about the hasp and staple lock. I didn’t know it was called a hasp and staple lock, but in order to write about it I had to name it, so I did what people do now and searched “locks” on Google. Eventually the word “hasp” appeared, and then “staple,” and then, as my friend Joe might say, “There I was.” As far as I can figure out, the staple is the big metal ring and the hasp is the steel rectangle with a rectangle hole cut out of it that goes over the ring. Once you have the staple sticking out of the hasp hole, you slap a lock on it and no one can open the door. But I didn’t need a lock. There is nothing in the garage that anyone would want to take, and I didn’t want another key to put on my overcrowded key ring. I just needed something to stick in the staple to keep the door shut against the wind. At first I found a strong little stick with some branches sprouting from the top and I put that through the staple and the sprouting branches kept it from falling through. But as the doors dried and they shrunk, the staple was no longer in the middle of the hole in the hasp, but it was right up against the hasp on one side of the hole, and I had to pry the hasp apart from the staple with the little piece of wood I used to prevent the hasp from opening, (which it wouldn’t do any more). So I decided two things yesterday: move the steel pad with the staple on it closer to the door that the hasp is screwed into, and get a new thing to put in the staple so the hasp can’t swing open. I looked around. What you need is usually not more than a few feet from where you are. Sometimes. I met the woman I would eventually marry in the apartment next door to me, in Los Angels, 28 years ago, but the college I went to (at first) was 5,000 miles away from my New England home. So I’m looking around, and about four inches from the garage door, on the ground, is this iron thing I had found in the dirt about 20 years ago when I was planting a tree or making a garden. I really liked it but I never knew what to do with it. So it lay near the garage, waiting to be used or recycled. It might have been part of an old, old tractor, or it might have even been from some pre-combustion engine farm tool that a blacksmith had made on an anvil. Whatever it was, I didn’t know how to use it and I didn’t want to get rid of it. Its day will come, I figured, back when I dug it up. I smiled now because this was its day. Now that I had moved the staple, and the hasp went back and forth over it easily, this iron thing would slip in the ring of the staple and keep the door closed. There was a perfect iron half circle at the top that would keep the thing from falling through the staple. When I’d want to open the door, I’d just lift the iron thing, pull the hasp back on its hinge, and pull on the handle. February is half over so it’s pretty much a down hill slide from now to spring. That means it won’t be too long before we can let the fire go out until next fall. I think the wood in the new shed that leans against the garage will last until spring. I was hoping a full shed would last all winter long. This is the first winter I’m using the new shed, and it looks like we’ll be fine. I just ordered a truck load of tree length logs from the man up the road who clears land for a living. He says there will be from 8 to ten cords of wood on the truck. That will more than re-fill the new woodshed. When you buy log length wood, it’s $600.00 a load. When you buy wood cut and split, it’s about $200.00 a cord. If I end up getting 8 cords in the truck-load he’s going to bring me, I will save $1000.00. Plus I won’t need a gym membership because I’ll be cutting and splitting that wood all summer long. Sweat in the summer for heat in the winter.   Treasure on Cedar Drive 02/07/2010
Treasure on Cedar Drive When I leave my driveway I go about 50 feet before I turn left onto Cedar Drive. I can go straight too, and stay on Samsonville Road, but I usually don't. Cedar Drive is about a mile long, and merges into Queen's Highway which takes me down to Route 209. From there I can head to work or almost anywhere else. When we first moved up here from the City, Cedar Drive had no power lines and almost no houses. Now, 23 years later, power lines zigzag from curve to curve and there are a bunch of new homes, but the road has kept most of its forest and most of its beauty. Two weeks ago I was half way down Cedar Drive, heading for Queen's Highway, when I saw on my left a pretty big log balanced on one end, standing about 3 feet high. The log was about an inch from the road. If a plow hit it in a snow storm, something big would have broken. Every now and then you see wood by the side of the road with a "Free Wood" sign tacked to one of the pieces. When I had to have a tall hemlock, growing right by the house, cut down because it was breaking apart and was about to land on the roof and take out the electric wires, I cut up a bunch of it into 16 inch pieces and put it near the road with a sign, "Free Soft Wood," nailed to it. Now that people are using outside wood burners, softwood is useful as fuel. Someone took the pile after a day. There was no sign on this big log on Cedar Drive, but its position next to the road seemed to scream out, "Take Me Before I Cause an Accident!" I restrained myself. I have a lot of wood right now. I left it for someone who needed it more. I also waited for the people who lived near by to move it away from the road if they intended to use it. Even without a snowfall it was dangerous. There are no lights on Cedar Drive and at night the log was almost invisible. At about 200 pounds and standing upright, it would cause a lot of damage to anyone who banged into it. Still, I left it. And then it was Friday evening, the second or third since the log appeared like a topless mushroom of epic proportions. It was still light out because it is early February now. No one was behind me and I just couldn't take it any more. I pulled off the road ahead of the log and then backed up to within a foot of it. I popped the trunk open and got out of the car. I yelled out, "Hello!" towards the house in case the whole thing was a trap to lure some wood rat like me to his death. "Hello!" I yelled again, to leave no doubt in anyone's mind that I was not there to steal or rob or make off with anything that wasn't actually being given away; and there was no answer. I hadn't even been sure until now if the log was hard or soft wood. I smiled when I saw it was red oak, like a parent smiles when he knows if his new baby is a boy or a girl. The parent says inside, "I don't care what it is, as long as the baby is okay." The wood rat with an indoor wood burner smiles and says, "I don't care if it's maple or oak, as long as it's hard." I rolled the log like a barrel to the open trunk, and then knelt to grab hold of it so I could lift it onto the edge of the trunk and then roll it the rest of the way in. I left the trunk open and drove the half mile home and unloaded the thing near the wood shed. And then I began thinking: it's too perfect to burn. I have time to decide what to do with it now that it is in my yard.   Take Me With You 01/23/2010
“Where’s Daddy?” Amanda asked. “Daddy took Buster out for a walk,” Mommy said. “Really? Where’d they go?” “Just for a walk. Down to the brook I guess.” “To the brook? Without me?” “You were sleeping honey.”  “Do you think he went all the way to the brook?” “He probably did. Buster acted like he wanted to go for a long walk.” “Last week Daddy went for a walk all the way to the brook.” “Really?” Mommy asked. “Uh huh. And there was an opossum hanging in a tree with a baby opossum on her back.”  “There was?” “Uh huh. And Daddy took his shoes off and walked in the brook and a crayfish bit him.”  “It did?” “Uh huh. Daddy pulled the crayfish off his foot and said, ‘Don’t bite me!’ Then he put the crayfish back in the brook and it disappeared in one second.” “Where did it go?” “It went under a rock, and it looked out with its eyes.”  “I never saw anything like that. It must have been fun.” “It was fun. I know it was. Because Daddy took me with him that time.”   A blue jay flew over. Summer was ending. Chickaree climbed up an old apple tree and jumped on to the metal roof of the new wood shed and took a look at the world. The brook slid through tall green jewelweed. Pine trees hung with long brown pinecones that would taste so good in the winter. The man who made the shed piled up maple, oak, and hickory logs in neat rows. Chickaree filled the spaces between the logs with pinecones, hickory nuts, and acorns. Chickaree made a deep, soft bed for himself in the biggest space of all, where no one else would see him. If another creature, like a raccoon, came near the woodshed, Chickaree screeched out loud, “Chick-a-ree! Chick-a-ree! Go away! Go away!” When it was winter, the man came to get wood everyday, an armful at a time. He found lots of empty nutshells and pinecones. When he found uneaten nuts and pinecones, he tucked them back in for Chickaree. Chickaree scolded the man to scare him away, but the man just smiled. “There’s plenty of wood for me and plenty of food for you too, little red squirrel,” said the man. “I’m glad my new woodshed is your winter home!” The man’s children came out to play in the snow by the woodshed. They hoped to see the red squirrel that lived inside. Chickaree climbed onto the snowy roof and scolded the children at the top of his lungs, “Chick-a-ree! Chick-a-ree! Go Away! Go Away!” “Don’t worry!” the children called to the red squirrel. “We’re not after your food. We love your red fur! We love to hear you call out, Chick-a-ree! Chick-a-ree!’’  | AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesAugust 2011 Categories |
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