Tag Archives: firewood

SIDE BY SIDE

Lesley Fry Photo

Spectacular weather yesterday on the Paregien ranch. Above 2,000 feet in elevation and twenty 4 x 4 minutes from the asphalt, it is a magic place rich with native and anecdotal history.  Currently, the feed is short but still greening since the 1.45” we got on the 6th, 7th and 8th of this month. The cattle have left the flats for the slopes and ridges where the new grass is growing faster, protected from frost by the remnants of old feed. Early last week the prognosticators canceled today’s rain, but have now forecast a significant amount for Thursday into the weekend.  (We’ll see.)

 

While pumping water, looking for the neighbor’s errant bull and measuring the corrals for a much-needed makeover, Robbin and I spent the morning with the Fry/Fox family cutting Manzanita and Live Oak deadfall for our woodstove because of my tendonitis. With our many hands, what fun we had!

 

It’s been several months since I carelessly cut a tree in the road that knocked me down, damaging the rotator cuff of my right shoulder. And about a month since compensating for it to pop a tendon, sounding like a gun shot, in my left forearm.  Enlisted now in medical protocol and procedures, it’s taken a couple of weeks to confirm the damage with an MRI.  Apparently surgery and long recovery is my best option. I see the Dr. again in 4 weeks, meanwhile I’m supposed to do nothing.

 

I am amused that only children and seniors measure their age in half-years, kids because they want to be older, and seniors, I suppose, eager to numerically reassure themselves of their existence. I’m 74 ½ and need to act my age.  My life, our life, on this ranch has always been physical and it’s been too easy for me to forget I’m no longer fifty or sixty building fence or bucking hay.  But to have our good friends and neighbors volunteer to help us get some firewood in was truly a wonderful gift on a beautiful day.  Thank you Chuck and Lesley Fry, Katy and Cody Hanson, and Allie and Shawn Fox.  You guys are the best!

 

WINTER FIRES

 

 

Color comes with cold and wet

within the canyon, even before

the creek flows or sycamores burn

 

leather brown to shed their clothes—

white bodies tangled in a pagan dance

to gods unknown.  Orioles return

 

as sparks in the brush, levity

in the pink overcast of dawn.

We glean the fallen skeletons

 

of oak and brittle manzanita

to fill the woodstove. Curious cattle

come to wonder what we’re about.

 

NOVEMBER 2020

One more cigarette
for the young dog
to piss and poop,
 
to explore the garden,
check-out the squirrel holes
before I load her up.
 
One more cigarette
to let the split oak set
before I stack it.
 
One more cigarette
and a cup of old coffee
to inhale November.
 

ODE TO MANZANITA

 

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                             …he fed the young flame with wisps of dry grass
                             and with the tiniest dry twigs.

                                           – Jack London (“To Build a Fire”)

A fair piece from the Yukon,
Jack—nothing warms cold bones
like a good fire. We, too, need

a flame to feed a woodstove
oak, the standing dead and fallen
to adversity and time,

and start with broken posts:
split coastal redwood pencil-thin
into a chimney teepee thatch

on crumpled newsprint
before the match leaps to catch
a hungry blaze, inside

shadows dance and touch,
begging brittle Manzanita’s
hard red heart that dulls a chain,

severed limbs of lichened skeletons
wait to burn hot and easily
to prepare the seed, lick the oak

with fire. And glowing early
morning coals banked in ash
start Manzanita sticks a flash.

 

BLACK SKIES

 

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Dark morning without moon or stars
before the first winter storm, the day before
Black Friday rains deals and discounts

for Christmas, for our economy and I am
ever thankful that the bulls are out early
courting cows, meeting kids and family

before dirt roads get too slick to travel—
ever thankful for the drought that felled
two big Live Oaks on the gate and fence

we corded-up and stacked beneath the eave
before the girls drove posts and spliced
the barbed wire on a mat of green

to leave the mess looking like a park—ever
thankful for them, for you and this ground
we’re invested in together, for good horses

willing to get the cow work done—
black skies without moon or stars,
you and I alone before the storm.

 

BLUE OAK

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A man builds a house around a fire,
rocks and hearth upon the earth—
cuts wood to feed it, to stand close

to the flame when cold to the bone—
a luxury: he gets in touch
with the basics, with the tree.

Sometimes he says a little prayer
for the century felled or fallen,
or nods to hardwood cores intact

all his long life, stacking brush
for quail, cleaning up for grass
and cattle, like we’ve never been here.

 

FIREKEEPER

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She knows her wood
and how long it will last—
loves Blue Oak coals
and the Live Oak with little ash.

Redwood splinters for an ember,
Manzanita for heat and flame,
she keeps a never-ending fire
three months warm each year.