A Spot in Kentucky

There's a place in Kentucky at the top of a hill where a burning wood stove heats the house. Its tended embers send curling flames around in swirls, and when the cold wind blows out of the north and the world outside is lined with ice and snow, by the stove is a good place to stand.

Beyond the windows that line the walls of this place are the grass and the woods and the hills and the sky. At the foot of the hill is a great woodshed with split wood for this year and green wood for next.

There is a creek further down in the woods. Its water runs and turns and splashes and falls. In places, it gathers in soggy patches of mire and muddy banks. And there are fallen trees to the side of the paths by the edge of the creek in places here and there not difficult to see. Hickories. Oaks. Great fallen hulks. Victims of tornadic bursts that blew thru not too long ago.

On a crisp day just before the new year, we gathered in this place. The woodsman among us took his chain saw to the smaller of some of those fallen trees (and felled one himself). And the rest of us threw the stove-sized pieces into the back of an old grey Jeep and a new green Toyota and stacked some and threw some into a heap by the woodshed, waiting to be split.

Waiting to be split. Waiting to be stacked under the tin roof of that great woodshed. Waiting for another year before it is their turn to be hauled up the hill and one-by-one thrown into that tended stove that heats that house at the top of a hill at the edge of the woods in a beautiful spot in Kentucky.

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