LIKE A LIVING STREAM

For the past few days a bulldozer has been clearing away the underbrush across the road, where the Baron has had his autumn/winter home for the past several years (he has a lot of other higher and lower places to live, so maybe he'll leave my biwa tree and winter spinach alone) and where resides the tall oak that helpfully cuts off my tv signal every spring and restores it every autumn so I can maintain an even perspective on society's progress and the relative importance of its communication through the tubular medium, which seemed to be severely wanting last time I looked. The bulldozer operator says the property is being cleared for sale, and he was not asked to cut any trees. It's only about to be put on the market. We were curious about the trees as firewood, since they would simply be treated as trash.

Purely coincidentally, when we got back from shopping yesterday we found a calling card in our mailbox, the card saying that the card-leaver, who lived down in the village, had some fresh-cut wood if we were interested. We phoned and he explained the wood's whereabouts, which happened to be a couple of roads further up on the mountain on a parcel of land he was clearing so as to expose the long-unused house there that had been overgrown by the forest, as someone was interested in the property. We went up and found the place on this morning's walk, and saw that a good bunch of slim beech had been cut.

Thus it was that toward dusk, after cleaning, gassing, oiling and sharpening the chainsaw I was alone up in the deep and even dimmer forest beneath a lowering sky already sparsing rain as the next hurricane quietly edged our way-- I wanted to get the logs bucked and out of there before everything got all wet and before the clearing fellow made his next cuts. He would appreciate my easing his task.

Surreality is lugging a chainsaw up a steep slope in dead-still oppressive air through silverized undergrowth in a silver forest bathed in the thick, silver light of pre-hurricane-charged dusk and finding downed trees only slightly more tarnished than the light; starting the saw to a roar in that static silence and begining to section the logs - the deer you heard plunging away at your approach now listening from just beyond the edge of sight - then the air never so static and silent as when you stop the saw and then hear the cling-clang-clong marimba sound of the wood falling upon itself as you throw it far down, closer to the van, before forcing a path through the thick bamboo, cut branches and vinery for your arms-full-of-wood self over and over again...

Good to let sweat run free, like a living stream...