Year-End Clean-Up

It seems very appropriate to spend a couple of the last hours of 2008 cleaning up a mess. The early winter storms on the coast left a number of trees down and Dave the tree guy - Owls Head's busiest man in December - finally got a chance just before Christmas to chainsaw the trunks into stove lengths. By arrangement that's all he did, leaving me the branches to haul to the gardens (now little evergreen igloos) and the cut logs to haul to the killing, I mean splitting, grounds next to the garage. I got the first of those two tasks mostly done today, at some cost to gloves and hair and jeans from sap. One tree had fallen right in the middle of a dense forest-lette of little firs, all about 6 feet high and fighting for sun and water in the space that the last round of fallen trees had opened. So I waded into their midst, pulling out branches and retrieving logs and generally aiding the survival of the firrest. In summer, with the mosquitoes and spiders and weeds and Bushes and God knows what mistakes of evolution lurking in the roots, the expedition would have been loathsome. In winter, such Southern nasties are gone and the scents are bracing and the wind off the water is bitingly fresh and January 20 just 3 weeks away. Very pleasant to work and sweat when it's 20 degrees.
One more slightly unpleasant task ahead - moving the logs in the wheelbarrow - and then the whole unprincipled mess will be cleaned up and the joy of splitting can begin. I would have liked to start the new year with the logs already hauled, but the postponement of pleasure can be pleasurable as well. If that is true, 2008 has postponed all pleasure for so long that 2009 will be a happy year indeed. There is nothing like the scent and sight of new wood opened to the world.