The day started sunny and cold and bright, good woodcutting weather, and I ended up bringing in something like nine bags of wood today. This is a good day’s work. I split some black cherry, which is so beautiful that I often feel a little bad about burning it. It supposedly takes the knife and chisel very well, and if anyone wants to carve anything out of the stuff I can provide the wood.
The spring has remained open this winter, and I brought up four gallons of water, heated some of it on the stove, and took a shower in the afternoon. It seemed wonderfully luxurious. I heated the cabin up to 75 degrees so my exit from the shower would be unusually pleasant, which it was.
I spent a little while watching a pair of pileated woodpeckers tearing apart the downed wood on the forest floor. They are such amazing birds: crow-sized woodpeckers, with far-traveling voices, beautiful white flashes on their wings, and red caps which can be seen from a quarter-mile away. They travel in pairs, which never fails to move me in some way. No matter how much time I spend in the woods, and no matter how happily, I still have the lurking sensation that I can only experience a half of something, and never the whole.
Then in the late afternoon it started snowing, as it seems to do for a portion of almost every day. A few days ago the snow was almost all gone. Sure enough the ground is white again, and snow is predicted for tomorrow and the next day as well.
I’ve been writing happily. I’ve burned through my computer’s battery, and I’m awaiting a new one, but right now the nights are so long I have time enough to write while the generator is running. When I cook my dinner I put on Prince’s “Baby I’m A Star” and I feel I have energy for all things.
Varro on Beyonce.
04-Feb-13I’ve been reading Varro’s De Re Rustica in the midst of my daily labors (mostly cutting and carrying wood), and seeing new mother Beyonce looking rather fit at the Superbowl last night minded me of this passage:
So apparently the contemptuous Roman term for overly skinny chicks – translated somewhat freely above as “Kate-Moss-types” – is eiuncidae, “stretched out like rushes.”
My father used to tell stories like this about my mother all the time, that she would work until such-and-such a time, give birth, and then get back to the working. But of course my father’s stories, like Varro’s I think, grew a bit in the telling. But it’s worth noting when you hear people adamantly denying that Beyonce could have possibly given birth to a baby and then been in such fighting trim so soon after. And of course there’s a whole website dedicated pretty much to the labors of pregnant woman around the world.