free...firewood

Co-worker P came to my desk on Tuesday to ask if I would be interested in some free firewood. Now picture my eyes getting real big. My two favorite words in the English language are free and firewood.

Are you kidding, of course I'm interested in some free firewood. I mean, it's free...firewood!

P had hired professional tree workers to cut down a big old oak in his yard, and they charge a lot less if they don't have to haul away and dispose of the wood. Which is a sweet deal for me, since what I really like to do is dispose of free...firewood.

So on Friday, my day off, I drove Hank the Ranger over to his house and loaded up the 40 pieces I could carry, and in the process got a workout or two - or four. First there's carrying from the stack to the truck. Then there's unloading at the back gate at Om Shanty and stacking by the back fence to cure for a year so I can split it. Eat lunch, take a break, repeat. Then loosen your boots and enjoy a refreshing Great Lakes Edmund Fitzgerald porter.

For me that's half the fun. It allows suburban office worker types like me to put on work gloves, move heavy objects, put the pickup truck to good use, and indulge - if only for an afternoon - in the fiction that I'm directly engaged in the primal act of providing the means of someone's survival.

Yeah right. It's probably not as much fun for the billions of people for whom this is an everyday reality, not a game and not a form of entertainment. Some privileged suburbanites go deer hunting or bass fishing for sport. I do firewood.

It's been a bountiful week in the realm of free...firewood. On Sunday I stopped on the way home from church to ask the man standing in his driveway on Lewis Center Road about the logs lying in the ditch. He said take what you want, so I did - just the few pieces that I could lift - and left the one's I couldn't lift. I didn't want the next passerby to see me lying in the ditch, so I quit while I was ahead.

Then on Monday co-worker B offered me four humungous ash logs that he had in the back of his van. More free...firewood! Although observers from the nearby office building might have mistaken this innocent exchange in the parking lot for an illicit trade in black-market goods, I swear it was nothing of the sort. By day's end those babies were nestled by the back gate curing until their time comes, probably next fall.

By Sunday I was looking to extend my lucky streak by taking down a couple of dead or dying trees in the back yard of co-worker D, but alas the stars did not align. Patience, grasshopper. Don't be greedy. I know that out there, somewhere, there is more free...firewood.