Firewood
J and I sort through the cord of firewood that arrived yesterday. It is “soft wood,” pine and hemlock. Some of it is so dry that even the large pieces feel unnaturally light. J has cut a measure of wood for me to use as a ruler; our fireplace insert will only fit pieces of wood up to 16 inches and many pieces are too long. I toss these to J who saws them in two and tosses them back to me. This is the specific element of danger: the screeching power saw, the tossing of the wood, which bounces unpredictably. J doesn’t feel the danger, but I do. It’s familiar: a mostly unfocused feeling of danger is always buzzing in the background of my waking life.
I stack the wood. This involves an exercise in reverse entropy that is actually very satisfying. I take two or more pieces of wood from the random pile and place them onto the wood rack in such a way that they’ll stay put and will also create a space for another piece to nestle on top or against them. It’s both imprecise and deliberate. It’s curiously satisfying to devote my body and mind to this. The sun is out and even though the day is relatively cool, I’m sweating. J and I don’t talk much, but there’s a sense of creating this together.
We make a pile of the heavier, oddly-shaped pieces of wood next to the chimenea. After dinner, J makes a fire. I lie in the hammock and use my star app to locate constellations. The order we’ve made of the wood chaos is only temporary, only resting energy, always changing. Now it is fire and warmth. Now it a sense of danger for Halle so that she refuses to stay outside with us. Now the sparks of it shoot through the constellations.