Hauling wood with Tay...

Taylor and I took to the woods to claim the last stack of split wood, hauling it up to the house and stacking it in preparation for the long, cold winter ahead.  She is my outdoorsy sidekick and doesn’t mind some honest toil even if it leads to a crushed pinky—they are battle scars that she takes pride in.

There’s something special about working together with your family to survive the winter.  So many things are done for us these days.  Food is grown for us that we purchase at grocery stores, heat is purchased from energy companies, running water is available at the turn of a nozzle…we just don’t think about where things come from and working the land or with our hands to provide for ourselves or simply survive certain seasons.  So when you have to band together as a family to work for something that you need to live, it does something in you.

As I high-fived Tay when she put the last piece of split wood on the stack, I felt such a sense of accomplishment and contribution.  She smiled and we hugged.  Another year of watching the cycles of life in the season of life.  

The tree grows, gets cut down, undergoes the violence of the chainsaw, gets thrown into a stack, meets the splitter, finds itself thrown into another pile to dry out, gets chucked into a wagon, takes a journey of being hauled to shelter, gets stacked for the winter, is taken piece by piece inside the house, gets thrown in the wood stove, burns to provide heat for the house, turns into fine ash, gets carried outside in a bucket, is thrown into the woods to turn back into dirt, and begins the journey of nourishing other trees to take root and grow to be cut down for future generations.  That is awesome!

Life if awesome.