Yesterday's sleet and snow are but a memory and today I set about accomplishing some actual work. Perhaps I overdid it - who knows. Started by sorting through the stacks of enormous pieces of black walnut, white oak and red mulberry I have collected in the last couple of years, sawed up some decent pieces and produced a lot of scrap. Usually I toss my scrap into the fire pit that is located where I cut down a large silver maple a few years ago, but since I was producing so much nice dry flammable scrap I had a notion to return to the scene of a fallen willow oak that I sawed up a couple of years ago. It's down the road, over at a friend's house, and chunks of it have been lying around, rotting, growing colonies of ants for two or three years now. Last year when I tried to clear some of it I got more ant bites in one afternoon than I have gotten in the rest of my life, and I have been bitten by ants way too many times. I told my friend I would continue to clear the downed wood and bamboo, and since she is out of town I thought today would be a good day to get some work done over there.
So I whipped out my Peavey, well, technically it's a cant hook, and rolled some of the largest pieces towards a makeshift fire pit over there, and that was fine, as they were enormous and there was no way I was going to attempt to lift them, but then I started picking up and carrying large pieces. I try not to lift anything over a hundred pounds as I read above that limit one's aorta can burst. Aorta know better as a burst aorta is what my father died of. I don't have to follow all the family traditions, just sayin'.
So I built a nice heap of chunks of dry hardwood from here, rounds of the soggy willow oak from there, added some gasoline, tossed a match and jumped back. I like living in the country, what can I say?
The air was cool, I overheated while I was working, and the fire was hot. Had it all goin' on.
