Wood

I had a cord of wood delivered last week: nice aged oak, cleanly split and stacked. It pleases me to see it all the side of my driveway. There was a time when a cord of wood would have been a great luxury. The house that we purchased when we first came to the valley was really not much more than a cabin: wood floors, open beams, little or no insulation. Where there was insulation, it proved to be newspaper wadded up and stuffed in the walls, featuring ads and articles from 1942. The living room had a fireplace, finished with faux brick, which served to heat the entire house. Admittedly, a cold night in Ojai is certainly no match for nights in Michigan, Toronto, or Maine, but it does frequently get down in the 20’s at night and is very often in the 30’s during the winter nights. So the fireplace was important and many of my memories from those years are somewhat related to it. As I had taken a job at a small, struggling independent school, my first pay was $7,000 per year, before taxes. We had a baby and another on the way. Even working construction in the summers did not allow us any luxuries and a cord of wood was out of the question.

The house sat on a large lot (three legal lots, I was later pleased to discover). The old fellow who built the place had worked for Edison and he had constructed arbors around the place out of cross pieces of phone poles. There was also stored an ample stash of old Edison wood in a lot on the south end of the property. In addition, the land had perhaps a dozen oak trees. In all, the detritus of the yard kept us in firewood for the first couple of years that we lived there. Sometimes the evening fires smelled of creosote, but that was what we had. I also became adept at scrounging. When I saw a tree go down anywhere in town, I would be there offering to cut it up. I kept an eye on construction sites and the fellows who I framed with in the summer would jibe at me for collecting the stub ends of 2x4s and stuffing them into my truck at the end of each day. But I knew that they were gold after the summer ended.

By our 5^th or 6^th year in the house, we had burned through most of the wood on the property and had begun to decide which pieces of arbor really needed to be torn down. There was one winter that was so consistently cold and we were so incredibly poor that I was patrolling the yard, cutting up lawn furniture and pieces of our back fence to keep the house warm for a few more days. When a fellow who had an orange grove up the highway offered to sell me a pile of orangewood for $30, I was ecstatic at the luck. Of course I had to find a truck and haul it, but that was fine. So it was orangewood that year and the few following that kept the house warm…or at least the living room…for most of the ‘80s. Needless to say, much of life transpired within a short radius of that fireplace. I would rise in the dark and build a blazing fire, laying out the kid’s school clothes for the day on the hearth. I would then roll them out of their sleeping bags and they would stagger to the living room to dress. I still recall, with fondness actually, many midnights standing with a sick child draped over my shoulder gleaning heat from the embers of the prior evening (By then I had learned the art of building an orangewood blaze in the evening and then dropping some oak on when bedtime neared. There were almost always glowing embers in the morning.)

So I was well into my forties before I bought my first cord of wood. It felt like such a luxury and it still does. Not only is it perfectly split, the young man who delivers is good enough to stack it for me. I think about our parents in this regard, the depression and the war combining to program them to rarely throw anything away, to reuse and repurpose well before ecology was a known word. Some of this has been passed on, as I am almost unable to throw out any fastener: screw, nut, bolt, or old nail. I have jars of them. And now I sit here, relaxing in my yard, as only a man can who has a fresh cord of wood stacked by the house with winter coming on.