Some Pretty Hard Back-Breaking Work Today

We have been blessed with one of the nicest winters I have ever experienced while being up north. We have been able to sit on the deck outside, coffee in hand enjoying the warming rays of the sun. But most importantly the nice weather has provided ample opportunities for me to get plenty of firewood. The free firewood has saved us thousands of Dollars in heating costs. Also, the mild winter made heating the house easy. We had approx. 4 cords of firewood when winter started and, looking behind our garage, we still have about 4 cords. I have been able to replenish our wood stacks as we went through the winter. And our latest load of wood came just in today. You remember that we have recently been out of power for 28hrs? Well, that storm took down many trees. One of them was knocked over in the cemetary of St.Anne’s Anglican Church, and it needed to be removed. It was a pretty big spruce tree and it had fallen across several of the graves. There was a question whether I could take it away. So today, I was out there, sunshine and blue sky overhead, ready to cut up that tree. Problem was the spot where it had crashed down was a good distance from the road and backing the trailer close to the tree was not possible as the ground was really mossy and soft. So after cutting off all branches I carried all the stuff to the nearest road, for transport to a disposal site. When I was done with that it was lunch time and I went home. After lunch Bea came along. We had to take our wheelbarrow to wheel all the cut firewood down to the road before loading it onto the trailer. Those root-end pieces were extremely heavy and the wheelbarrow often got stuck in small holes. It was truly a back-breaking work, and I exhausted myself. But finally we had cleaned up the site and removed every little piece of the tree, the only evidence left of our work being the saw-dust on the ground. Over the next couple of weeks I have to split the wood and stack it. It might be very labour intensive, but it has been very healthy for me to do. I went back to the weight I had years ago and I enjoy doing the work, even though today’s was a bit on the hard side.