F. and I had a difficult discussion yesterday. He has been having some relationship difficulties and was in a deep funk, very very depressed. It hurt to hear him talk about it. We talked several times through the day and finally by late evening he had spoken with her and was doing better. But it left me feeling down. I am happy that he feels he can come to me with it - in fact he tells me that he feels like I am the only one he can really talk to about it - but it is hard on me as well.
Then just after I went to bed the phone rang again but this time it was a friend whose partner recently died somewhat unexpectedly. We talked for a bit and I was glad to see that he was doing ok. He has his ups and downs but is, at this time, handling it. Luckily he had support from friends.
I woke up today feeling better and started to exercise. The phone rang. I got off the exercycle and it stopped ringing. I went back to doing my exercises and later it rang again. This time there was a beeping noise on the other end. So back to my exercises. Just as I finished one of my exercycle sessions (I do three with various exercises in between to give my butt time to get some circulation again:) F. called. So I stopped to talk with him. It was a good conversation and I felt much better after talking with him.
Tom was in his overalls and heading out to the barn to get the tractor ready so I quickly got off and got dressed. We were planning on dragging a fallen tree to the orchard for firewood and I knew if I didn't scurry he would just do it without me. He cut off one of the branches. It wasn't very cooperative though and even though cut through managed to wedge itself and not drop. He pushed at it; I took a branch and banged a way at it. It didn't seem to want to move. Finally we got it to drop, put a chain and a cable on it, attached it to the tractor, and pulled. It was the wrong angle and simply wouldn't move. So Tom drove the tractor down the driveway, found another way to approach this spot near the house and we tried again. Now the branch wedged itself into the ground and wouldn't budge. So Tom went and got a wooden plank and we lifted one end and slid the plank under it. I trudged 50 ft or so away to be clear of the cable if it should snap, and he pulled again. The branch fell off the plank but did move a few feet. He jockeyed the tractor back and forth but that was it. We went back and lifted it up on the plank again. I moved back up hill 50 ft again. It moved a few feet and fell off the plank. This process went on for some time. Eventually we finally got it to a point where Tom could back up the tractor, lower the hydraulic bar, chain the branch to it, and lift the end up. Off he went following the zigzag path he had taken to get there. But the tree didn't seem to want to bend around the other trees so it got stuck. Tom got the chainsaw and topped off the smaller branches. I carried it back to the rest of the tree while he finally dragged that branch off to the orchard. Well that was 1/3 of the job.
While he was gone I looked at the lovely wild flowers growing on and around the large rocks. Planting my heels in the ground at the bottom, I leaned back against a lichen and moss covered rock that came up to my chest and waited for Tom to return. What a beautiful day!
The next branch was easily cut off but the broken section of trunk was being held up by that branch so it fell when he cut it off, scraping his arm but luckily doing no damage. Amateur we both said. Actually we said that a lot during the 3 hours this all took. It has been quite a few years since we have been doing firewood and we seemed to have forgotten some of our skills. It wasn't quite as much trouble to pull this branch out. This was a good thing as one of my outside tendons to my knee was sore from all the scrambling over uneven ground and rocks going back and forth from the first branch. And I wondered why I had worked out on the exercycle that morning.
Finally Tom began to work on the section of standing trunk at the rock edge of the hill. He worked and worked. While he worked I put one hand on the boulder and drew strength from it so that I could continue to feed energy into the shield that I put around Tom after he scraped his arm. I should have thought to do it sooner but it worked out all right. Tom decided that the problem was the saw blade was dull. So he headed out to the barn to get the sharpener and I headed up to the house to make us tea. When I saw him head back to the tree I hurried out as I could see that he was not going to wait for me to get back before using the chainsaw again. He made two cuts on the side the tree should fall towards and then somehow ended up with parallel cuts instead of converging cuts to create a wedge that could be removed. But he back cut it anyway and it did decide to fall where we wanted it to go. He used the cable and chain again to haul it out. But the hook broke. We had another one but it kept coming loose. He finally just asked me to try and get it to stay. So I did. And it stayed attached. He hauled it off to the orchard.
As he was coming back to collect tools, two pickups, one with an ATV on a trailer came up the drive. It turned out to be the surveyor and the person we are selling some of our land to. The surveyor needed to find some open spots to mark because he uses satellites and GPS to do the surveying then a computer to figure out the boundaries. It saves him a lot of time but he still has to do a lot of walking to mark several spots along the property lines.
I am pooped now. Luckily the firewood was the main thing on the list for today. Hopefully we will do more tomorrow though so there will be logs to cut up during our Dearinth Work Party this weekend - at least if there is enough time and people to do it. The main task for that is to mow the Dearinth.
Copyright © 2001, 2002 Kyril Oakwind