Kathryn Scanlan
The firewood he piles like bricks, building a barrack. I would never try to push it over. It is humiliating to be defeated by objects. Some things, you can see how solid they are; you don’t need to touch. Others look soft but resist. Still others look soft and are soft, and that is a disappointing thing. Such things let you fall along a slippery trail for years with nothing to block your way.
Pushing his stack of firewood would be like pushing a house and expecting it to fall. Ridiculous! You would never do it unless you had an exaggerated sense of yourself.
Although, some houses can be pushed over. I’ve seen it happen. What a thing! But it’s better not to think about the possibility, because you will most often be let down. Sure, a person acting alone can build a house. But we would prefer to think it takes more than one to take down something so carefully put up.
His firewood stack grows in the shadow of his house, then becomes a house, and casts a shadow of its own.
Animals find their way into the stack and make their cramped and stubborn homes. It is foolish to expect them to respect the labor that goes into building a stack like that, to look on such a structure and be unable to see it without also imagining the work, indeed almost feeling the ache in your own arms, the sweat on your brow, to become fatigued simply by looking at a pile of wood and thus to keep your distance, to assume from afar that the structure is solid, and sound, and immovable, and impenetrable.
The stack reaches its zenith, is complete. We all enjoy it for a time. We marvel. So it is disheartening, then, to watch over winter its dwindling, its daily reduction, its shrinking girth. Snows fall heavier and heavier. When he first put the tarp on, it seemed funny and frivolous, like a skyscraper in a sweater, but as the pile shrivels, the tarp appears to grow larger. It drapes now like a mantle, an ample cloak. We watch from the window, worrying a hole in the sleeve of our sweater, and in our mind we kneel in the snow and draw the tarp closer. We fasten it. We tuck it in safe and warm.