AFTERWOOD

Spent this afternoon quartering and stacking bucked locust and cherry wood from an up-mountain neighbor with too much unthinned forest on his land (locust, a very clean very white light wood, burns hot and fast and is great for burning in a wood stove before and after regular fires to clean the stovepipe; a lot of such useful info at Woodheat).

Just before dusk when I'd finished the last of the cherry wood (great fundamental cherryish fragrance), full of the pleasure a high stack of great-sounding red and white wood affords, I meandered across the road to where one farmer had trimmed his paddy slope to the smoothness of a golf green, and I laid there on one elbow looking at the Lake and mountains and the sky as the evening mountain air mixed with the setting sun poured down over me with a coolness just barely this side of water. What a pleasure.

The forest all along the mountain curve was spotted with dots of red, yellow, purple and gold, trees just beginning to turn with the season. Further off, two crows flew north, straight toward the pot of gold, disappearing right at the point where now turns into then.