A new load of firewood waits for someone to move it into the shed. Doesn’t seem like a big job unless you consider that each piece of firewood must be picked up and set down again. If there are 300 pieces of firewood that means I have to bend down to pick up or put down wood 600 times. My back hurts already!
If I thought this prospect was daunting, how do you think young Benny Bunny felt when his hiding place was discovered after only a short time and he came bouncing out from under the firewood? Now he will have to find another place to hide.
“Don’t fret, Benny,” said Bonnie Bunny. “As long as we have each other, we can snuggle up together tonight. But for now, let’s get out of here. Quick like a bunny!”
You can see how tiny Bonnie is compared to the piece of firewood she’s sitting beside.
We had some wood delivered the other day. A tree (not on our property) was deemed to be unsafe where it stood and so was taken out. This is an older picture of the wood splitter we would need to use again.
The Captain hauled the wood splitter closer to the wood shed and started work. The pieces of wood were too heavy to lift, so after rolling them over to the splitter, a little help was still needed to get the wood up onto the splitting beam. See the small plank leaning on the side of the wood splitter? That is for rolling the rounds of wood up into place.
Since this wood was going to be a good deal and excellent for heating the house next winter (as long as we did all the work), we had the rest of the tree delivered as well.
And who is supposed to lift THOSE? A power saw to make a cut when needed, and a splitting maul to crack the rounds into four pieces might make them more manageable. And now we have our work cut out for us. Even the job of splitting the wood will warm us up.
Thank goodness we still have the backyard supervisors to help us do it right. The picture of the supervisors was taken about five years ago when Emma (with her ear flipped back) was about one year old and Ruby was eight.
As it happens, today is Ruby’s 13th birthday. She’s a bit grayer around the muzzle and has a few lumps and bumps on her body, but except for being deaf, and sleeping more soundly, she is still managing to hang in there.
Happy birthday, Ruby!
“Uh-ohhhh!” Lincoln says. “Busted!”
“I think Anneli found the mess I made when she loaded firewood in the wheelbarrow yesterday. All the walnut shells behind the wood, bits of sunflower seeds — they were all tucked away behind the first row of stacked wood. I heard her say, ‘Ahhh-HUH! Ratty has been here!’ It was all I could do not to laugh out loud. She had no idea it was me, Lincoln — her favourite squirrel.”
“But now I’m busted. What to do? Run? Naw … she won’t hurt me.”
“So I asked her, ‘How’s your Christmas going so far?’ But she just snorted. Must be too much work right now. Everything happening at once. I heard her grumbling to the Captain about how busy the traffic is.
“Too bad. There’s no traffic here … except those spaniels of hers. I’ve got their number though. Don’t know why Anneli thinks they’re so great. They can’t even climb!
“Although … that Emma can jump pretty high. Think I’ll duck for cover just in case.”
“She’ll never find me up here. See me? To the left of the big chunk of wood on top?”
“I think I’m being zoomed. She does that sometimes with that gadget she points at me all the time. I can hear it going ‘Z-z-z-z-z-z-z … beebeep – click.’ It doesn’t hurt though.”
“Oh, look. Isn’t that sweet? She’s put some walnuts on the firewood for me. And what’s that, she said?”
In Aesop’s fable of “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” the ant works hard all summer preparing for winter, while the grasshopper chirps and plays and sings.
When winter comes, the ant is prepared but the grasshopper suffers.
The ant tells him he shouldn’t have idled his time away. He doesn’t offer to help; only admonishes him. It’s a hard lesson and a rather cruel, heartless response from the ant, but that’s reality.
“Idleness brings want”, “To work today is to eat tomorrow”, “Beware of winter before it comes.”
These are some of the lines used as the moral for this fable.
Take your pick of these old sayings. The end result is the same. They warn us to prepare for hard times and not be caught out.
In the heat of summer, we have been working like ants, preparing for winter. We have a big load of firewood to deal with. Usually we prefer fir, but the maple was a bonus.
Some of the logs are quite big and the rounds are still too big to handle.
See the yellow-handled splitting mall and the wedge lying on the ground beside it at the end of one of the maple logs? When the rounds are split in half they are more manageable for placing onto the track of the hydraulic wood splitter.
One piece is ready to be split.
When the motor is started you just engage the lever and the steel plate is pushed against the wood, until it is squeezed against the wedge at the end of the splitter. The wood splits in two, and is then more of a size that’s right for the woodstove or fireplace.
But of course it still has to be stacked. That’s where Mrs. Ant comes in. I should change my name from Anneli to Anteli. What’s one letter? (A lot of work!)
The campsite is just in the trees near the bottom of the photo, at this end of the lake. We thought it would be good to get some firewood from the logging slash piles behind the camp. If we didn’t need it, we could leave it for the next campers.
In the sweltering heat on the hillside, we cut and loaded a few bits of wood.
“We must be completely nuts to even think of making a fire. It has to be 30 degrees C,” I said, wanting to get back to the shade of the campsite.
But the evenings can cool off, so we persevered.
On the way back, at the bottom of the hill, I saw something.
“Stop! There! Is that a bird … or … is it a … stick? Or a rock?”
From inside the truck and at this distance I couldn’t tell what it was. I had been fooled many, many times by rocks or sticks that looked like a grouse at the side of the road.
“I’ll zoom it and take a picture. Then I might be able to see what it is…. It’s probably just a stick.”
Through the truck window the blurry photo really looked like a grouse, but the … thing … hadn’t moved an inch in the two minutes we had been sitting there in the truck.
“Just wait,” I said. “I know it’s just a log or something, but I want to go over to it and take a picture of the stick that fooled me.”
I got out of the truck. It still didn’t move. With my camera ready, I was about to snap a picture of the stick, when it flew away.
But sticks never fly away with tail feathers spread out in a glorious rusty brown colour. It was a ruffed grouse.
At home I put the picture in my photoshop app and lightened the dark shape. Now, even in the fuzzy picture, I could see the rusty colour and other features like an eye and a beak and a tuft of a topknot.
He was very good at hiding in the twisted roots of a fallen giant tree nearby. Although I looked for him, I didn’t see him again. Just lots of sticks and rocks.
wordsfromanneli 