BRIEF THOUGHTS ON A PARALLEL LIFE

Yesterday T-san, the farmer who owns the plant nursery acreage up the mountain from us (just beyond the double bend in the road) stopped by and said he'd heard from the village grapevine that we of this house had a wood-burning stove and were always on the lookout for good firewood anyone might be cutting down for discard; that he had just cut down an old kaki (persimmon) tree on his land up above and was going to cart it away from there and trash it, but if by any chance we did want it we could go and "WHO-O-OSH!!!" he was spinning around in my doorway wrapped in the vortex of my thanks and I was up there loading the wood into my van. Dense, heavy, beautiful wood, makes me wish I had a parallel life in which to start young in becoming a traditional carpenter so intimate with wood as to make a perfectly joined kaki wood work of art that would one day be in a collection somewhere of timeless 21st century artifacts by nameless artisans, but in this particular non-traditional carpenter life that's a few weeks' worth of winter heat right there. (I still have some beautiful cherry wood, though, that I've never been able to bring myself to burn; what's a day's heat in comparison?) T-san said he'd be cutting down another kaki tree pretty soon, I thanked him again and prepared my firewooding tools for further spontaneous whooshing, and subsequent carpenterial wishing. This could be the start of a beautiful relationship.