I guess I should explain the woodpiles. I have 21 of them. I counted them today, taking as one pile one stack of firewood piled 3 to 4 feet high on rails with cribbing at both ends, that is, with towers of half-round, cross-piled logs to bookend each pile. Each stack contains one-third to one-half cord of wood, so I figure that I have at least 8 cords on hand. That is what I should have: 4 to burn this winter and 4 to season for next year.

Last week I visited the man who grew up on the farm of which these 23.5 acres were a modest part. In his boyhood (be was born in 1925) this land, now mostly woodland, was pasture for sheep and cows. The woodlot was elsewhere on the property, and they took 30 cords of firewood out of it each year: 10 for the family house, 10 for his grandfather’s house across the road, and 10 for sugaring. His father always had it stacked a year ahead of time, too. He would have had nearly 60 cords laid up at this time of year, which puts my 8 cords in perspective. All that wood would have been cut before chain-saws and splitters, moreover. I do split with a maul myself, but my woodpiles are child’s play compared to the cords of the past.

I am not much of a quant, but let me do a little arithmetic. My woodbox holds roughly 40 pieces of firewood. It’s 10 or so cubic feet. That works out to 500 pieces of firewood per cord. That means I have cut, split (as needed), and stacked around 4000 pieces of firewood since October of last year. I had to cut most of those trees down anyway, and the biggest ones, an oak, a black birch, a red maple, and two beeches, had outgrown their welcome in the backyard.

I have come to know my wood well during these encounters. When a cord and a half gets stacked on my front porch over Christmas (I am expecting the help of elves), I imagine playing the 16-foot-long pile like a xylophone, according to the day’s needs: selecting a fanfare of split red maple for the first fire of the morning, then variations on the theme of heat with maple rounders or pieces of black birch, giving way to well-seasoned oak or (depending on the temperature outside) a riff of hot-burning hornbeam, and then in late afternoon, when the fire has died down, a piece of popple or paper birch to quickly reignite it for the evening burn.

Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection.  I love to have mine before my window, and the more chips the better to remind me of my pleasing work. 

Everyone who heats with wood knows who wrote those words. The guy had a small house by a pond, and an open hearth instead of a stove. And he too used his wood strategically:

Hard green wood just cut, though I used but little of that, answered my purpose better than any other.  I sometimes left a good fire when I went to take a walk in a winter afternoon; and when I returned three or four hours afterward, it would be still alive and glowing.  My house was not empty though I was gone.  It was as if I had a cheerful housekeeper behind.  It was I and Fire that lived there.

I too can see, and smile at, some of my piles out the kitchen window, but I haven’t developed that same intimacy with this not-yet-arrived winter’s god of fire yet, especially during the sweet, mild December days we’ve been having lately. It is 6 pm, and the biscuit fire I laid this morning has long gone out. I may or may not light another one this evening. But I remember how close I felt to Fire last February. That was more like survival than housekeeping, though. I am ready!

These were not the first snowflakes. Those fell briefly at the peak of autumn foliage. Even these did not accumulate: it turned out to be just a dusting. Delicate flakes dropped from a cloud that was enveloping the mountain and seeping through the woods. I watched them fall through the frame of an eastern window, with the bare-limbed trees behind them. They descended gently in straight lines at a modest diagonal in the soft wind. The flakes were heavy enough to fall, not drift, but slow enough that the eye could ride a single flake from the top of the window to the bottom: Zen skiing. The lines bent and straightened as the breeze rose and fell.

At the same time, a fire was burning in the woodstove at half the distance to the window. My old Resolute has a stove-glass fanlight across the upper portion of its doors, with iron ribs like rays and curving elements festooned between their terminations. The orange of the fire through the frosted glass was the orange of the rainbow, bright and warm. Pieces of the sun were burning slowly in my woodstove: What is the energy in wood but the light of the sun in organic form? The fire breathed and glowed in the fanlight while the snowflakes fell steadily in the window.

Today I sorted nails and screws in the cellar. Also nuts and bolts and washers, hooks and hinges and picture hangers, brads and tacks and hardware for the screens and windows. The nails were of two kinds, galvanized and ‘bright common’: framing nails, roofing nails, box nails, drywall, finishing, 8d, 10d, 16d, and the ‘d’ stands for ‘denarius’, in English ‘penny’, as you may know, and the screws were brass or steel, Phillips-head or slotted, in I would say more than forty sizes and designs. Each nail or screw went in and out of boxes and jars and cans to be with its fellows, the 8-penny finishing nails tumbling and flashing like a school of minnows, with a stray 20-penny spike like a barracuda making havoc with lesser nails in the miscellaneous jar.

Miscellaneous jar, because I did not sort every last nail (that’s for the obsessive-compulsive personality, and I am only a household handyman who needs to find the right fastener from time to time). Besides, not all nails need be sorted for jobs when you need just one or two, perhaps of an odd size or function, viz. nailing into cement or brick. I threw, for example, after a brief caress, half a dozen of those tough, short cement nails with the twisted shank into that jar. And then there was the decorated tin box of old brass screws from Holly’s grandfather, and coffee cans marked 8d and 16d by my father on masking tape stuck to the side, heirloom nails and screws which stand apart in my mind, and now on my shelves, and which I would not hesitate to use if I needed them.

“L’artiste doit régler sa vie,” wrote Erik Satie in “La Journée du musicien.” Of course, his daily schedule as he reports it may also be looked at as a series of impulsive and irregular acts:

Get up: 7:18 am; be inspired 10:23 to 11:47 am.

Take lunch: 12:11 pm; leave table at 12:14 pm.

Healthy horse-riding out on the grounds: 1:19 to 2:53 pm

Order or disorder? “Important or unimportant?” as the King asks in Alice. My nails are ordered, what of my books? What of my papers, what of my thoughts? Open any drawer, or box, or lobe, and you will find evidence of an ordered and disordered life and mind.

Perhaps you have visited a small-engine shop, not the front desk but where the work is done? Tools and parts are spread from wall to floor like a cubist collage. The effect of disorder is oppressive. And yet the repairman may play that space like a piano, with a feel for every nut and bolt. Or he may search for ten minutes for the right wrench. I suspect it is something in between; it is for me. Wasn’t it Montaigne who said we think and act with a staggering motion? But ask me now for an eyebolt or a bugle-head screw to stiffen a railing and I can go downstairs and find one for you promptly.

As I dug down into the lowest edge of the immense pile, shoveling the rich, crumbly clumps of dark brown manure near the Van der Werken’s horse barn two miles down the road, emptying shovelfuls into my nine buckets, I saw myself as one of those toiling gold miners in South Africa, mining along the terraces of the deep pit, toting buckets of ore up by hand. I myself was shoveling black gold, and I was lugging my buckets up into the back of my car, then dumping them all over my vegetable gardens, which are in need of some more nitrogen and organic matter.
I got four loads in at half an hour a load. It’s free for the taking, though I had a jar of my hardy kiwi jam to offer if I had seen the owner, who lets people come and take as much manure they want. He has neither the time nor an interest in composting and selling it, he told me last weekend. As I dug deeper, I opened up galleries in the pile, chasing veins of the blackest material. When I picked up my two-handled, rubberized plastic tote-buckets, carrying them against one hip, I thought of Walafrid Strabo in his 9th-century monastery garden on Lake Constance. In his Hortulus, the Latin poem he composed about his garden, he recommended adding “whole basketfuls of dung” to the soil. That phrase from a translation read 40 years ago stuck in my memory and foretold this day. It was warm enough to work without a jacket, and the low sun kept the  landscape lit up. To the south was the valley of Bennington and Mt. Anthony, our humble Mt. Fuji, its wooded top (which I have never climbed) flooded in clear light.  I spread the last loads of manure on the main garden as the sun dropped down behind West Mountain.