Firewood

It all started with a post on the "free stuff" group that operates in our county. A lady mentioned that she would split a whole oak tree's worth of firewood, if someone would cut the dead tree down for her.

So I went by and saw it...a MASSIVE white oak tree that died last spring. It probably was a victim of lightining. I may take a photo of the view from this lady's yard. She has awesome views of the surrounding mountains in NC/TN.

Later in the day, I learned that Claude Mathis, our associational missionary (that's a Baptist thing) also was looking for firewood. He has 1) a better chainsaw than me, 2) training from Disaster Relief on how to use the chainsaw, and 3) acess to a woodsplitter. So he was elected to take down the tree.

Mostly, I stood around and watched, though I did lend a hand with an ax when we ran into embedded old nails in the trunk. And I sharpened the chainsaw some. I left Claude yesterday afternoon cutting "rounds" out of the trunk. It was over 32" in diameter, and the tree was well over 40 feet tall. Like I said, massive! I'd hate to think how much the thing weighs.

Anyway, that's a chore I have to do Thursday and Friday afternoons and Saturday. To get the wood cut, split, and transported to three places--the lady's porch (she's hooking up a wood heater to supplement her propance heat this winter), to Claude's house, and to our house.

Cutting wood takes me back a lot of decades to when I used to help my younger uncle Troy cut wood for granddad Dyer's house. We had to cut kindling, small stuff for the cookstove, medium stuff for the wood heaters, splits about 2 feet long for the fireplace, and cut the limbs about 6 or 8 feet long to go under the sorghum syrup cooking pan.