Departing the Sensory

Hilling Black Aztec with my father's widest hoe, I cut weeds and pull chocolate earth to hills of four and five stalks. It's not easy work and best done early. Halfway on my last row I found myself not unlike Black Aztec with roots in another soil and still with memory of the network of mutuality. And as I hilled this seed crop, I felt my core strength building, stronger together, the only way I know how to live in this America that holds no container capable to contain our grief. We can no longer escape. We are the world once again.

Elmwood in a Queen Atlantic Now this is a stick of unsplit elm, damn near taking up the entire firebox, just added to a bed of elmwood coals. Elm is the perfect burning wood for this lowery spring. Despite what has been written about elm burning "like churchyard mold," I have found that if you cut your elm standing dead, and when the bark has just begun to slip, but not yet falling off in sheathes, and you cut it stove length and put under cover, you'll have the perfect cheery spring fire, enough to drive away the dampness, but not enough to drive you out! In 1976, we joined Bertha O'Brien, her granddaughter Grace, and their boarder Leland Smith, a retired teamster who had spent the better part of his life doing the field work for farmers in the area. Bertha had lived in the house her entire adult life and was about 94 at the time. She was in charge of the cooking. It was a ham dinner, from one of their own pigs. The only cooking stove in the old low po...

Pausing, I stand at the top of the world now well into February with my concerns half your wood, half your hay behind me. I stand in the clarity of my neighbor's expanse of sky it might be ten degrees I move snowshoed above the earth our uplands a frozen sea I am in shirtsleeves barehanded to stillness where the bottom of my fear drops away. - Jay Robinson, 2016

Look closely ... this is "snap wood." Not a tree species, but a name given to the process of cutting up a small tree for firewood, where one makes each cut deep enough so that a long section can be easily "snapped" by hand. Some care must be taken to leave enough wood at the end of making each cut so that the whole tree can be hauled easily without breaking up. If your stove takes 16 inch wood, make your cuts 12 to 14 inches apart, as the remaining hinge of wood will break with the wood's grain, rendering a somewhat longer stick. For years, whenever I cut up pole sized firewood, I remember Frank Farrin, who first told me about snap wood. In fact, no one else has ever mentioned snap wood before or since. I recall him at the store, foot up on the newspaper rack, describing how Alva Bridges (someone correct me if I'm wrong) would get in his firewood. If anyone else out there is running low on dry wood, find a small dead standing pine or ...

Mid-March. I always think of my father working at the woodpile, and myself tapping maples. Snow's half gone, some bare ground, some crusted snow drifts flecked with a winter's worth of wind driven bark and twigs stripped from nearby trees. Out in the middle of the field, less debris, but still bits of straw or feathers, or whatever skims the fastest on thin crust. What's left of winter's drama is fossilized in March's freeze and thaw -- a broken stem of Queen Anne's Lace lies in its cold imprint, the scant remains of a kill marked by its frozen blood. I notice these things in March. It's the time between seasons, a place between worlds: out from under the blanket of winter, yet not merged into the moment of summer. I see the shortening shadow. I count even paced footsteps. I hang my sap buckets made from my father's old George Washington pipe tobacco cans with homemade wire bails. I hang my buckets from the maples that line the stone wall that runs f...