Wood Piles

 

A few months ago a dead tree down by the former milk barn fell over into the path.  Three days ago Gary cut and split the final pieces of it, which you see here.  When I think about it I find it incredible the amount of memories I have that revolve around fire wood.  Where would I even start recording them?

To begin with I'll say that up until the age of 22, which is the first time I left home for an extended period of time, I had never actually lived in a house that didn't have wood heat.  (This was in the summer of '91 when I lived as an exchange student in Mexico for 5 weeks one summer.)  Summers in Mexico don't generally require any sort of heating in the house at all, so I have no idea how they heated their house.  But in very rural coastal Northern California we almost always had to have some sort of heat in the house, year round.  Summer evenings can get quite cool, even in August.  It gets foggy, more often than not, in the afternoons and evenings and a heat source of some sort is usually used to dispel the damp, if nothing else.

We had wood heat exclusively in our house; which isn't uncommon there even today.  I never knew a time during my childhood when the fetching, splitting, hauling and stacking of wood weren't regular chores.  It was a constant mess in the house, of course and a constant chore to keep the fire going.  It was a daily chore to fill the wood box on the front porch.  I wonder how many miles I racked up pushing a wheelbarrow back and forth. 

My father only very rarely ricked all of the wood into tidy stacks.  We went through so much that usually it was just tossed into a large pile and used from various sides so that none of it sat there too long and rotted away.  I vaguely remember him occasionally buying a load of wood, but usually he got it himself from up in the hills further away from the coast.  He'd get a firewood permit and go onto government land to get the wood.  Those are different stories.

To keep the piles dry he would use large tarps tossed over them.  In spring and summer of course the rain would make large puddles on top of the woodpiles and frogs would lay large masses of eggs in those puddles.  I would collect the hatched tadpoles and raise them in jars or containers out in the woods where I spent most of my free time.  

At about 10 years old I was given a little hatchet and was expected to chop kindling.  As I got older I remember learning to use the axe to do more chopping of wood.  I remember one summer my older sister and I spent time fetching wood together and swapping off chopping the wood.  Some of the cuts were tougher to chop than others and while I don't remember many details I do remember there was quite a bit of laughter involved as we got wood.

The mixture of kids and wheelbarrows is going to mean much more than the fetching of wood, as one can imagine.  There were many wheelbarrow rides given, races and whatnot.  I can still see that rusty brown wheelbarrow in my mind's eye.  I don't remember any color on it whatsoever, handles and all were solid brown, rough in some spots but worn smooth to the bare metal where we touched it regularly.  I think somewhere I have a picture of it, probably with one or more of us kids or with my niece or nephews in it.  

Wonderful memories.