FAMILY

Standing out on the deck this morning in the chill breeze from the north, cooling off after a long, sweaty task involving stones, as I stood in the shallows of my immediate self with all its discomfort and other rightnow problems of oh, so many complex kinds, my body took its usual first deep, welcome breath after heavy physical labor and my nose lifted me to full delight in the sudden beauty of weeping-cherry blossom fragrance, from deep back in all time... a message from the ancestors...

BLESSED

Blessed it is, on a day as clear as a baby's eyes to be out here working with oak trees, following their nature, their noble nature, right down to the ground-- the very heft and scent of integrity, the sound of tiny flames when the sections split into two, four, eight and more; then when they're stacked like pieces of cloudy gold how rich they look, how precious a mark of one's labor, rising there in the drying sun-- warmly it tells of winter comfort, tomorrows given to other things, balm for the aching muscles, then at day's end to come inside and there is food...

ELBOW GREASE

If a new neighbor were to come to you and say, "Howdy, neighbor, I have a few too many producing oil wells on my property I have to get rid of so I can build my house, do you want them? They have to be out of there in one week, though, or the builders will take them away-- I'm asking cause I heard that you heat your house with oil," you would naturally at once become blurry with feels like 24/7 action-- Free oil! Free heat! And of course would be frenziously unceasing in your effort to max the oil before the deadline, all of which is by way of explaining my elbow.

Because oil and wood, apart from their both being sun derivative, are one and the same if they are your fuel. Both need a bit of processing first of course, to make them usable in your heating system: exploring, drilling, pumping, refining and shipping in the case of non-renewable oil, and felling, bucking, splitting, lugging and drying in the case of renewable wood. All of which takes time-- in the case of oil, mainly by complex and costly manmade machinery, terminally hooked up to vast tankers and pipelines; in the case of wood, complex natural machinery comprising sun, air, rain and earth, simple tools like an axe and a wedge, and a recently evolved but complex refining device, i. e., me.

The result is the same: a warm house at the heart of winter, where, unlike oily machines that get no joy at the end, when my refining work is done I stand toasty beside my woodstove, warmed with homemade fuel, watching the snow fall among the trees...

Oh yeah, the elbow. My right elbow. All that chainsawing, felling, tossing, lugging, stacking and splitting compressed into those few days by the deadline (we made it), predominantly using my right elbow, has caused some sort of irritation to the muscles and possibly the joint of said juncture, which feels for the moment as though I might be my actual age, at least for a while, as I stand here at the window enjoying myself by not bending my arm, because I have to take it easy till my slower-paced youth returns, when I can go back to my labors at a measured pace using a natural elbow.

Beautiful replenishing refinery I have outside there, though, whole forests of it, rising into the sky. Plus, my golden firewood is all the way prettier and more fragrant than oil. And though cheaper as well, it's worth more, too, in terms of care, excitement, exercise and other true values, like supertankers of elbow grease.

OF TOMORROW

Ah, the deep pleasure it is to sit here at the end of a fine hardworking day, entire body wrapt in that luxurious lassitude of labor (strictly unintentional alliteration) and watch the hawks riding the air swells in timeless professionalism, enjoy the swallows filling the still-blue air with their kind of writing, take part in the sun setting in its lightspilling way over the blue lake...

From here where I sit I also overlook the woodsplitting stump where I’ve just been laboring into the shadows, the wheelbarrow resting on tomorrow’s woodpile; with cold beer in warm hand I trace the striations of calm and turbulence wrangling their curlicues on the boat-empty water as the lake too settles from a day’s work, rolling over in shades of blue and gray toward tomorrow, its fluxing currents of warm and cold not so different from my own - we are ancient relatives, after all - it is a time of welcome solitude for the lake and I, its body knowing as well as mine the traverse of sun into stars, light into dark, warmth into cold, here in this now that is the source of all understanding, of genesis, of tomorrow.

SISYPHUS AND I

As Sisyphus would tell you, if he weren’t busy at the moment, wrestling with a rock is unlike any other activity. First of all, right up front, rocks are the most conservative entities in existence. Resistant to change of any kind, they hate to move, they are monumentally stubborn (granite, adamant etc.) and they are way more familiar with forever than we are.

As I live on a mountainside, ever since I got it into an opaque part of my mind to straighten a protrusion in the stone wall out front (thereby widening our driveway by a meter or so and easing the qualms of Echo whenever she has to back the car in), I have acquired a new sympathy for and kinship with the guy who metaphorizes the hopeless task, having now myself sought to move a giant rock on a mountainside without the aid of any power other than my own muscle, simple leverage of all kinds and my expanding array of international imprecations. But no TNT or power shovels, so the Big Sis and I are still in the same ballpark.

We mythoguys have this funny characteristic: we tackle life's series of rock-moving type jobs all powered up with internal bluster, confident in our ability to get a simple brute-force, all-muscle task done before lunch, the same characteristic that got the Big Sis to where he is today, somewhere on that slope up there. It's a powerful quality, until it leaves the rails. Thus it was that from the toolshed I selected the little handpick and the big prybar, that should do it, and went off to address the pushover.

I’ve never seen a handpick look so toylike so fast, or a heavy duty prybar bend that much. Turned out that the rock, which I've discovered is a member of the Stonehenge family, was no mere surface presence. Apart from its granitic heft, it had an iceberg quality in that so much more of it was underground than above. I had to dig to find out just how far toward New York it went.

Three noons later I'm Sisyphizing out here atop Gibraltar, surrounded by prybar, wooden timbers, a steel beam, two saws, rope, chain, the car jack, a shovel, a full-sized pick, a scythe, another empty water bottle, piles of dirt and rocks and even the comically tiny handpick way over there where I threw it, wiping away sweat, wringing out the towel and admiring the hole I’ve dug beside this distant cousin of the Washington Monument. Before too long after my nap, I’ll be able to topple this baby, maybe as much as a centimeter.

I'll get the pyramids done tomorrow, before lunch.

THE THING ABOUT SPRING

I don’t mean the blossoms and butterflies, birdsong and frog choruses, blue skies with hawks in love and whatnot, they’re all great don’t get me wrong, but there’s the rocks to be moved out in front from around the Heavenly Bamboo etc. for that edging thing we’re gonna do, the forsythia has to be moved back too, then there’s the huge jinchoge bush that because the heavy snows from the roof (who can foresee everything?) bent it over so much is overgrowing straight into the driveway and has to be cut back as soon as its done blossoming, then dug out and transplanted up behind the stone wall where it can knock itself out with blossoms all over the place, be my guest, and of course all the edging stones out back that have to be moved for the big garden re-do we’re planning, in re which the shiitake logs have to be restacked out of the way, wherever that might be, there’s some pondering to be done there sometime, same for the leftover firewood, in which connection I also have to asap split the plane tree sections we scavenged so they can maybe dry enough over the summer, then there’s the rain gutter plan, the deck to be painted, and-- but the accursedly soft caresses of this vicious and intractable Spring Fever that has me in its marshmallow grip-- it’s incurable I know, as a victim of all the past Springs - decades of them stacked up - I have to accept it, nothing can be done, I simply have to live through it, wait it out as always, helplessly sipping a medicinal beer out in the afternoon sun on the deck like this, whence I view these pending labors much as Hercules must have scoped the stables etc. in his day, only I’m breathing the perfume of jinchoge and plum blossoms and cursing my laggard fate, staring now and then at the lake, filling the distances all around with random eyesight and forgetting whatever all that stuff I just wrote about was. The sudden absence of recollection brings welcome relief.

AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS-- NEVER LEFT ME, ACTUALLY...

This is not to imply in even the slightest way that I personally am grossly -- or even head-over-heels -- in favor of this proposal, despite the obvious fact of my early winter morning love embrace of thick down comforters that so tenderly hold in all this hard-earned warmth, priceless here at the icy heart of winter, when if you stick your neck out you can see your breath ask what the hell for, when every non-rabid wild animal is nowhere to be seen out in the stark icyness, but rather is cuddled wisely and warmly, in the ancient tradition of major drowsing, deep in nest and burrow throughout the land, and if you wish to insist upon insisting to me, as I lie here trying to get back to sleep, that we shirted, slacked, belted, shoed, tied, suited, coiffed and officed humans are not wild animals, just back away slowly and raise your arms in order to look as big as possible.

From here in the warm depths of blanket mountain where no job is required, I suggest that you leave me to ponder the idea over the winter - closing the door quietly on your way out - and further that you let it run through your own protracted hibernian dreams - saving greatly on food and fuel - and then in Spring, as experts in the matter we'll go outside and see if the grass is growing...

THE MUSHROOMS OF UNDERSTANDING CHINA

There I was the other day - a fine day - with 40 beautiful, fresh shiitake oak logs tapping their feet waiting to be inoculated with that fine megashiitake spore I'd copped at the farmer store along with a special shiitake-inoculating drill bit, but by the time I got home from the store it was too dark.

Then after a next day in the office doing one-after-another-after-another of just a few of all the things that are distinctly unrelated to the task of inoculating shiitake logs (there are approximately 10 trillion such things), early the next morning I stacked up the already ongoing shiitake logs for the winter, then did some editing of mere words, saving the late afternoon hours to inoculate about 10 logs.

Then a little more than an hour before dusk I plugged in the long extension cord for the old 100W drill and began, got about 6 logs drilled and inoculated, when on the seventh log the tired little drill said Nope, no more, Bob; this is it pal, see ya in heaven, then darkness fell exactly the way it does after your drill gives up. Then I was in the office again among the 10 trillion things.

In time I managed to reach the shore of another weekend and went off to the farm store once more, this time in search of a bigger, better, more powerful drill, and found one I wanted, a Japanese brand-name 400-Watter, for about 120 dollars-- and then another I wanted more: a 430-Watter with an extra sidebar handle for about 160 dollars, but I didn't want to spend that much, since I'll mainly be using it just to drill shiitake logs once or twice a year as the old logs get used up and become great compost.

As I stood there pondering a solution to my econoshiitake dilemma I noticed some other, differently colored drills lower down on the tool display shelf-- way down there, in fact, sort of pushed to the way back of the way bottom. Their price was too low for the kind of drill I was after, but I hunkered down there anyway, since I wasn't going anywhere at the moment, reached in and pulled out one of the boxes, noticed that it was in fact the same kind of drill, except that it was a 480-Watter, had one of those great sidebars, and cost about 30 dollars! And was made in China-- probably using fine, Japanese-made electric parts.

One-fourth the price of the higher-up drills of less power and more costly utility, Japanese drills that only a moment ago had gleamed in my mind's eye as equipment of the highest standard, prestigious and priced out of reach; they now looked a bit forlorn, their luster dimmed, their true price now apparent (approx. 80% markup over labor cost, since they too were assembled in China, I'll bet).

So of course I bought a bright and shining miracle Chinese drill, took it home, plugged it in and finished five logs like a dream, in a tenth of the time. It was the Ferrari of drills, as far as I was concerned. And as I drilled on efficiently into the dusk I suddenly saw first hand what China was really about to do to (and at the expense of) the developed world and its laborers, apart from vastly increasing my shiitake crop.