I welcome winter. I’ve had a rough year and winter, no matter how harsh it may be, inevitably ends what was. It paves the way for what will be. Ice and snow is the price you pay to encounter spring. Whether you intend it or not, life begins anew each spring. I’m pretty beat and look forward to renewal.
You’re thinking “no shit Sherlock, it’s rough for everyone” and I get it. I don’t intend to get in a pissing match about who’s life sucks more. 2023 didn’t pan out well for me but it could have been worse. Everyone has complaints and they’re all heartfelt.
The question for all of us is “what are ya’ gonna’ do about it?” I’ve made my decision and it doesn’t involve getting black pilled and bitching about politics. (Sometimes I can’t help but bitch a little, forgive me. I try to keep politics on a short leash but we do life in the crazy times.) Politics isn’t that big of a deal in the overall arc of things. So there’s always hope. If you can get back up off the mat, do so. I have. I’ve been deliberately trying to be happy. I’m succeeding. Part of being happy is moving forward. For everyone else who’s 2023 sucked, I hope it’s working out for them too.
A week before Thanksgiving the weather turned unseasonably warm. The small amount of snow on the ground dissipated. I set out to “un-do” a fuck up from the hectic spring/summer. I have some land and I ignored it. Despite what suburbanite Karens and University dweebs have been made to think, the earth is not a delicate flower. It doesn’t crap out on the fainting couch if we don’t cut enough checks to the right charities. Life will find a way, and ignored fallow land goes apeshit! You have to keep up with it because nature never sleeps. My half assed little deer plots had turned into a sea of weeds. A chunk of my lawn, which is never really that nice anyway, had devolved into a feral shaggy jungle. Unbeknownst to me, several trees had fallen under all those weeds. That’s just scratching the surface.
Usually in November there is naught one can do about vegetation. You have to wait until the snow melts, then wait until the muddy soil dries enough to drive a tractor over it… by that time the spring’s orgy of greenery is well ahead of you. That’s a fact of life for a homesteader, you start the summer behind the eight ball.
This year the weather threw me a bone. Weeds are in their winter dormancy yet still exposed and vulnerable to my brush hog. If I act now, maybe next spring might be different? I formed a theory that if I shred the weeds before they lie all winter under the snow, the biomass might decay instead of clogging my disk in the spring. (A disk is a tractor implement that turns dirt, like a plow. It does great on tilled fields but sucks balls if the dirt becomes sod. If the vegetation is tall enough to wrap around the disk’s axles it’s even worse. Little details like that are the meat of living close to nature.)
So I put the implement on my tractor and started driving around with my Cuisinart of Submission. Brush hogging isn’t my favorite task. It’s a bit of a rodeo; fraught with chaos that just cries out for broken parts. You’re mowing shit you can’t see and the ground is uneven so you’re either bouncing all over the place or slowed to a crawl. Who knows what’s underneath chest high foliage? There’s an internal inconsistency in trying to go easy on the equipment while performing an inherently violent operation.
Every now and then the brush hog lets out a mighty “thump” as it impacts with… something. This isn’t always a big deal, brush hogs are designed to “give rather than explode” when encountering a rock or a stump. But still, it’s nerve-wracking. My tractor is adequate but expensive. It’s not yet paid off. I try to baby it.
While I was gingerly picking my way through this mess, other thoughts got in the way. I don’t have enough firewood.
I’m not complaining; merely acknowledging the math. Good intentions don’t mean shit and I’m absolutely going to run out of wood heat. It takes a shitload of labor to fell, haul, buck, split, and stack enough firewood to heat my drafty old house. This year my labors were spent in the service of higher duties. I stacked some wood but not enough. It is what it is.
In case you’re wondering I do have an oil fueled furnace. It heats the place enough to keep the pipes thawed and so forth. On furnace heat alone the house is “habitable” but it’s never cozy or pleasant unless the wood stove is lit. Also, the furnace is expensive as hell. The best situation is when the fire is going most of the time and fuel oil is cheap enough to take off the edge or fill in when I’m sleeping or out of the house.
Speaking of the Thanksgiving season, I had a few years “living easy” with the furnace and I truly appreciated them as they happened. I didn’t take it for granted. I miss them now that they’re gone. During those years when everyone was freaking out about horror of the Orange Menace and his mean tweets, oil was cheap. It gave me some breathing room. I could afford to buy extra fuel oil to “fill in the gaps” and stretch a somewhat limited firewood supply. It was just one of many bits of “breathing room” that I miss. If I ran low on firewood during the Glorious Reign of the Perfectly Creased Pants the cost of fuel was high and my ass was in a sling. Then again I was younger back then. I mostly got ahead of the situation through pure grit. Now that Captain Dementia has won the most votes of any president in American history, fuel is expensive again. Also, I’m a little older and slower to stack the tonnage. I didn’t manage it well last winter and did even worse this year.
The whole cycle of induced unpleasantness feels grim but also unnecessary. I didn’t like the cold forlorn 1970’s. I don’t like reliving it all over again for more or less the same reasons. Then again, I’m not in charge of such things. Neither are you. If we must relive Carter’s malaise lets do it with aplomb; pop open a can of Coke and play Nintendo, pretend it’s a can of Tab and pong. We will all spend a few years freezing and that’s just how it is. Perhaps cycles of failure are a necessary part of life?
Despite these less than pleasant thoughts, at least I was clearing brush. Solving one problem out of 99 is better than wallowing in failure. A shaky step forward is still a step forward.
Stay tuned for part 2 where I run over a tree.
I was a tree guy since 1982, when I got out of the ship yards (dangerous place) of San Diego. Urban tree service is not like doing rural trees. Urban involves lots of rigging and “be careful” of the home owners stuff. Dealing with firewood though, is very similar, hard, yeah, there was demand for fire wood in San Diego. Now that I live in rural Tennessee, I just cruise over to the local wood mill and get a bundle of slab wood, the outside with bark parts that are removed to get to the dimensional wood. It’s about half a cord, they load it on my trailer with a loader, easy peasy, I give them $10 to $20, depending on type, and haul it home. I then load it into a rack ( 2 rows of t-bar fence posts with 18″ gap between the rows and 18″ gaps between the posts in each row, driven into the dirt). Cut in the middle of the gaps with my medium Husky and stack them onto the row of fire wood which is 2 ft from the rack. I copied my neighbors method when I got tired of chasing traditional, expensive, split cord wood. Burns great, only a few pieces have to be split (which I do with a short handle, double bit ax) because of the too small wood stove. Small size/door but super heater. I feel yer pain, since I’m still doing this at 72. If I paid someone else to do it, it would be hard work, but since I have to do it, we call it recreational therapy. It’s all in the attitude, so I been told.