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...

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 ...