Winter is firewood season. Days are short. Light precious. Reasons to get into the light hard found at times. I stack rounds of cut logs in the Autumn to pull me outside for splitting in the winter. I know few happier jobs than working in the winter sun to store away next years warmth in the woodshed. The crack of the axe in a round of wood in the frost of a morning. The world turning it’s slow course around the steady centre of the work. Wood well stacked, cleanly done. Light let in to me too, in the hours wiled away under bright skies.
The trees we take are largely storm felled or damaged. The Spruce, planted by a former farmer, grow to monsters here, and are shallow rooted. They let go in the wet soil in the summer storms, crashing down, singly or in great pick-up-sticks piles. We lose some Ash every year too, Willow, Alder and Sycamore as well. A rare and welcome Beech – our warmest wood – will fall or be so damaged by rot so we have to take it.
Weather, light, the sound of the silence after chainsawing, the rough happy work of splitting cords of wood with an axe, the crack of wood bursting apart. The planting of trees to replace what has gone and to grow our hoarded stock of wildness. All happy things. As I shape my farm so it too shapes me. Body and mind. There is contentment in it. We are both altered, one by the other, for the better, I hope.
We work with chainsaws, axes, mauls. We work with sledgehammers and steel wedges. Log tongs and hookaroons. We work with hands and bent backs and barrows. Hard work. Rough work. Rewarding. Clouds of breath drifting across the woods. The light slowly sleeping in past the skin. The flicker of the sun through bare branches. The quiet bite of a spade as it slices the clay to plant a tree in. The chivvying call of thrushes when I get too close to the haws. The Raven overhead beating the skin of the air with it’s wings, the drumming thump of it’s beat, the sound of it filling the quiet as it passes overhead.
We leave deadwood standing often. Ash and Alder trees that decay and rot where they stand. Insect hotels. The woodpecker I heard first last year has been flitting along the farm drive and into the quarry field. She has chipped out a divot in a standing dead alder trunk to overwinter in. The tik tak thunk of the woodpecker has become a sound of Spring. Added to the cuckoo call. The stark winnowing of the Snipe. Spring builds to a wall of sound. Gathers pace and bursts into a tumult. The thousand bird song of a Spring dawn on the farm. Layers of sound that drift like a wave across the fields and woods. The sound of light and growing things. And me, adrift in it. This is the way with nature. Caught in the unknowable swell of the bigger world I am. A fragment of eternity that breaks across my small piece of farm.
Winter and work with wood brings it’s own slices of wonder. The blackbird couple that hunt the drive. They will turn the same leaf ten times over in a week. Hunting together. The pair will hold this territory for their lives perhaps. Much as they hold to one another. For life. They will often stay together from beginning to end. They work their patch together. Harvest what the hedgerow holds. Pick over cleanly what there is to have. Not so different they and I. Cleave to each other and a territory and will not let go. They are of a piece of this place and of one another. And so it is with me. Tied to place and the family I share it with. One thing not separate nor distinct from the other. And there it is. The wonder. Not so small a slice perhaps.
They have come to see me as commonplace. Rarely flitting from their hunt. The split of wood as it bursts apart something they now live with and are at ease to. My comings and goings do not disturb them so. And where we think they nest we leave. Year after year. The blackbirds. Tied as much to here as me. Space for us both. The work really to make more space for other things to share here with. And so. To planting more trees.
Shaped and shaping. Each becoming more a piece with the other. The land makes me as I make it. We grow into one another.
