Amateur Lumberjack

I woke up stiff and sore today. Yesterday, incidentally, I spent several hours breaking up the apple tree that was cut down in this post. I have a sneaking suspicion that the one led to the other…

Ibuprofen it is, then.

This old apple tree wasn’t huge, but it was vaguely tree-like, with the size that implies. So it was with some dismay that I observed my father returning from renting a chainsaw having found a tiny electric Husquevarna that seemed more appropriate for slicing bushes than full-on trees. Four hours later, we were left with this:



And an impressive pile of sawdust and shavings which smelled great, but managed to get under every layer of clothing that I had on.

My father, after the first hour of running that little Husky at full chat through hardwood, gamely brought out the splitting axe and took a whack at one of the quarters that I had sawn down. No joy, the wood was too hard and too wet to do anything other than bounce the axe straight back into the air. He set it aside for later.

We went out in the afternoon to stack the apple wood and bring in some of last year’s maple to make room for it. I touched off a fire in the fireplace tonight for the first time this winter, so the house smells a bit smoky and very rich. I can’t wait for the apple to be dry enough to get thrown in.

In any case, I was happily splitting the larger chunks of maple when the neighbor kids came home. With the maple as dry as it was, I was taking huge swings and sending the splits flying across the yard with the most perfectly sharp CRACK you could ever wish to hear. Inefficient, I know, because then you have walk farther to pick up the splits, but I was having fun. I don’t get to chop wood very often.

The neighbor kids, apparently, had never even seen it. Well then. If there’s one thing that twelve year old boys should learn and love, it’s the experience of splitting logs. It’s just a big manly thing to do, and the neighbor’s two boys seemed to really enjoy it. Suburban kids don’t get to play with axes often, if at all, but they figured out darn quickly that it’s fun to watch the wood go walking end-over-end across the lawn, and that children are particularly good at picking up the kindling around the chopping block.

While both boys are a little small now, it won’t be too many years before they’ll get their chance to hit things with an axe.