Sunday 31 August 2008

out in the woods

Today Bear hacked down some trees and then we all piled the junks* into the trailer, and now it's all sunning itself in a pile, waiting for the splitter next weekend.

I'm so glad that's done.

Next weekend will be busy with the splitting and the lugging and the stacking and the piling, but then it will be done. DONE.

Not to say it wasn't pretty back there. Our property runs back through a watershed rife with cranberry bushes and ferns to a mainly spruce-and-pine woods and is teeming with neat things to look at and find.

(NOTE: I was sweaty and covered in dirt and wood shavings. Not the best place to take my preshus camera. So alas, alack, no photos.)

The corner of the watershed farthest from the house (directly below the rock with the chain) was apparently the household dump during the 50's or 60's - a few rotting metal things remain and once in awhile we'll find a neat old Watkins bottle or an ancient beer can, but nothing disgusting.

Not much new junk today (some bits of colorful glass and a dried up chunk of paint fished from the bottom of a falling-apart old paint can) but we did see two mushrooms, white stemmed with lurid lipstick-colored caps, and a funky little 'kellapillar' (a Roseyism) - black with green stripes, large red-orange eyes, two long black fur horns, one long black fur tail, and four patches of thick bristly short white fur down his back. I'm not very good with caterpillar identification and I can't find this one on any sites, but he looked like a very regal sort of fellow.

We made it inside just before the sun switched off and the thunder began, and we spent the next few minutes with our noses pressed up against the windows, oohing and aaahing before it swept itself off, as storms tend to do around here.

Now it's cold and dreary, and tomorrow it's supposed to storm.



Not the best weather for lumberjacks.




*B says this is the wrong terminology, that they're stove lengths of firewood, but he junked it, so it seems to me that they should be 'junks'.

3 comments:

Woman in a Window said...

We could TOTALLLLLLLY do with 3 or 4 more cords of stove lengths round here! Cut and piled sounds like a dream!

Regal sounds about right for just the catepillar that you've created in me brain.

Anonymous said...

The product of junked wood is not junks, it's wood.
Nova Scotia talk gets complex sometimes. Heh.

Linda said...

I used to help my grandfather split and pile wood, though we generally used an axe, a wedge and a sledgehammer. My brother was allowed to use the tools long before I ever was which annoyed me to no end. I was a girl but I could still swing that sledge hammer! Grandpa used to call us his "pile-its" because we took the wood and piled it for him.

Years later, the first fall after Sarge and I moved into this house, I took him into the back forty and taught him how to split wood the old-fashioned way. We've had toasty fires ever since. (So there, Grandpa!)

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