Actually, It’s Not

On the path

The past few days have had a spring-like feel. The ground is bare and soft, and yesterday, I swear I could actually feel the day lengthening, stretching into the corners of dawn and dusk.  It’s absurd, of course: It’s the middle of friggin’ January. We’ve got at least 10 more weeks of winter proper, plus whatever dismal, rain-tossed tussle between the seasons April brings.

Still, we sure can use the added daylight. It’s time to get serious about next year’s firewood – I generally like to have our logs pulled by the first of the year, and so far, I have only a handful, a nice fat black cherry that was starting to rot on the stem, and a bunch of little soft maples that’ll make good cook stove wood – but the days seem to be over before they’re hardly started. I often think that winter is too short, that it goes by too quickly. It’s the season when we’re supposed to be tackling all those pesky little projects that got put off all summer. “That’s a good winter project,” we proclaim, over and over and over again all summer long, until the list of good winter projects is longer than the season can possibly accommodate. Good thing we rarely specify which winter.

That’s ok. We forgive ourselves a lot. We have to, frankly, and I suspect that the older we get, the more we’ll have to forgive. Every year, there come at least a handful of occasions when I simply cannot fathom how we’ll get done what needs to get done. It’s not so much a feeling of being overwhelmed (although I’m certainly not immune to that) as a feeling of simple disbelief, a sort of dumbstruck sense at our own naiveté. We thought we could do that? And that? Hahahaha. But the funny thing is, we always do get it done. Maybe not precisely when we’d planned. Maybe not precisely as we’d planned. But done, nonetheless.

When I get to feeling like this, I often draw a certain quiet inspiration from our neighbors, for whom the list of daily tasks almost always stretches further than the day can accommodate. I think of Melvin, collecting firewood one tractor bucket load at a time to feed his big basement furnace. It takes a load per day or if it’s fairly warm, maybe a load every other day. I heckle him about it every so often, but all he does is grin. He sure didn’t get his firewood pulled by last January, and he’s doing just fine. Or on the other side of us, Jimmy and Sara, up at 4:30 every morning for milking, and now coming in to the sugaring season, when on some nights they’ll barely get to bed before it’s time to get up again.

It is our blessing to count as our friends and neighbors some of the most resourceful people I’ve met. I almost wrote “resilient,” but that’s a word that’s really starting to chafe me, for reasons that are perhaps too complex to go into right now. But resourceful? Definitely. Once when I was talking to Jimmy, I asked him if it ever bothers him that he wakes up every day – and I mean every freakin’ day of every freakin’ week – with something like 12 hours of work facing him. Milking, sugaring, plowing driveways, firewood, fixing something-or-other, and on and on. He just shrugged. “I figure it all has to be done, so I just do it,” is what he told me.

I figure it all has to be done, so I just do it. It could be argued, I suppose, that life is infinitely more complex than that. But I think it could also be argued that actually, it’s not.