Here I am in the garage on this cold April morning. I pull on my husband’s serious, heavy-duty work gloves, clamp blood-red protectors over my ears and don paint-splattered goggles. My look is complete: a good imitation of a giant insect with red dome ears and oversized eyes. I am ready to chew up this stack of wood with the help of my favorite piece of equipment: the little yellow log splitter.
We have bonded and work as a team, this splitter and I, to fill a large willow basket with ruler-thin kindling. The ear-protectors drown out the drone of the hydraulic mechanism, and my mind frees itself from the mundane with the physical routine of manual labor. Pieces of pine fracture along well-defined planes that feel like honeyed satin. The pungent yet sun-nurtured scent of the forest is here in the garage as I split the wood into ever thinner shafts of kindling.
The smell whirls me back to that long ago fall when I studied the crumbled and compressed Colorado rocks to learn their geologic secrets. One afternoon, black storm clouds scudded across the sky, and swirls of yellowed aspen leaves tumbled across the student parking lot with a fine crackle like static electricity, invoking a powerful love for this four-season landscape. I completed my field work and drove back to Ohio, wondering if I would ever return to Colorado to live.
That opportunity materialized when Pat and I married two and a half years ago, the second union for both of us. His father and stepmother had put down deep roots in these mountains on acreage with aspen and pine, trees that had aged year by year with them. A software engineer and a writer can work just about anywhere and from their home, so why not a house in Conifer near family? A “For Sale” sign soon appeared in front of our California home.
Near the end of that 2004 summer, Pat packed our computers, a boom box, a few dishes and even fewer pans in his car, essentials that would suffice until the movers arrived with our belongings. Two indignant, yowling cats and their large wire cages filled the back of my car. Whenever we stopped during our 1,200-mile journey, out came our caged passengers, who soon attracted curious children and leashed dogs. The next day, near Conifer, the black highway glistened with late afternoon rain, and I rolled down the window to smell damp spruce and pine.
Later that fall, I planted daffodil bulbs in soil of decomposed granite that sparkled with each spade-full of earth I overturned. I stopped digging when Vince, my robust 80-year-old father-in-law, rattled up our driveway with a trailer full of split aspen and pine, the first of four loads he delivered over the following year.
And now, in the garage, I think about the man who harvested trees on his 34 acres of Colorado land, a man of few words whose many good deeds were done without fanfare or the need for thanks. He fills my thoughts when suddenly a chunk of pine splits apart like an explosion, hurtling two halves across the garage. I retrieve one piece and find that it is riddled with long, bullet-shape knots that had grown perpendicular to the grain, the result of wayward pine cells that had multiplied in the wrong place and killed this once sturdy tree.
Vince’s body also harbored erratic cells that had coagulated and caused this strong man to collapse one morning as he filled his bird feeders. Our lives changed forever on that cold December day, and now as I look at this split piece of pine with its errant knots, I am reminded once again that there are no ironclad guarantees, no perfect deals, no foolproof plans.
It is ironic that we had moved here to be close to him, and now he is gone. Things change, like the morning’s pile of once-thick logs now reduced to kindling. But as I remove protective gear and morph back to myself, we the Colorado newcomers hold on more tightly to each other, to our family members, and to our new friends, grateful for the gift of each new day.
Marilyn Flanigan (marilyn.flanigan@gmail.com) is a geologist and author of “Antarctica: Exploring the Extreme.”
