I must offer apologies to anyone who might anticipate my weekly blathering. I am, admittedly, guilty of the appalling crime of blog-lag, but I’m also exhausted, and I’m sure you will forgive me (all five of you) when you hear my sob story tale of adventure.
You see, on Monday morning—my usual blogging day—we woke up in wonderland. I think it was the sound of our breath cracking in the frigid air that actually awakened us. The temperature had plummeted unexpectedly overnight. Frost coated the windows—on the inside—and outside curtains of heavy snowflakes were covering everything in a cold, pristine whiteness. Beautiful yes, but while the woodpile crowned in snow makes for a splendid Christmas card, it hardly cheered us to realize that our heat source was being rendered useless, flake by charming flake.
All hands on deck! The enemy was upon us, come by stealth in the night to catch us unawares and unprepared with our wood untarped. No wood, no fire…no fire, no heat…no heat, no happy.
There was no time for a call to Currier and Ives. We dived into our clothes, doing what my partner, the Freedom Hill jester, called the I-wish-I-was-in-Mexico Hat Dance as we hopped about, donning socks and winter boots like cats on a hot tin roof (though that is a singularly bad analogy in the circumstances). It might be only a matter of days, maybe hours, before we could not longer drive up the hill, and the supplies had to be brought in…now.
We grabbed our gear and headed out the door. First stop the hardware store, where we bought every last one of the largest tarps they had in stock and a few cinder blocks to anchor them against the wind. Second stop the general store for some on-the-run breakfast and warm footwear (you just gotta love general stores). Third stop the old timer down the road who, we noticed, had a large pile of wood stacked invitingly beside his house, and who, we hoped, might agree to let us have some of it.
Along the way we hunted down a supply of hay to put around the house. It’s the best and cheapest insulation money can buy, assuming the neighbour’s cows don’t have at it when the pickings get slim. Don’t laugh; it happened last year to one poor devil who came home from a day trip to find a herd of sufficiently sated bovines just finishing up the scraps while the wind whistled a happy tune under the house.
So, to cut a long post short, because I can hardly keep my eyes open, I’ll just say that we’ve spent the last few days hauling wood in our old van, a third of a cord at a time. Up the hill, down the hill, up the hill, down the hill…loading and unloading the day away. Today we were out in the woods, cutting and hauling and stacking. Tomorrow we haul hay, and so on it goes.
And on the seventh day, when even God got to rest, we’ll still be going, trying to catch up on all the things we’ve perforce neglected—such as our paying jobs—because time and winter wait for no man, especially on Freedom Hill.