Monday, January 30, 2023

Being us

Zoë gave me this for Christmas



It's an unusual kind of 5 year journal.

Each page is divided into 5 sections. Each section is devoted to one day in one year. You write the year on the top left of the section and answer the question in the section allotted. The next day you answer the question on the next page. The following year you go through it day by day answering the questions again. 





Some of the questions are heavy duty and some are lightweight:






I think it will be interesting to see how my answers change to the same question through the years. if indeed they do.

Someone I don't know well asked me recently if my husband was going to a gathering I’d recently signed up to and I said “No. He’s not a social animal.”
“Well he should be,” came the swift reply.
"No, he shouldn’t," I said, "he should just be himself."
The person - a good hearted sort - then apologised.

For Dave, lately, being himself has been about gathering firewood. Last week he went the whole hog and gathered a tree. 

There was a dead ash tree, still standing, in the field along the lane and he asked the farmer if he could buy the tree and chop it down for the firewood. They agreed a price and Dave put on his boiler suit and grabbed his kit and off he went. Sadly I was not there when he made the definitive cut, but here he is soon after. We had no idea the tree was hollow, but we felt we’d got a good deal anyway.





The tree was in the middle of a large field which meant barrowing all the wood to the road where Dave loaded it onto the trailer and then went back for more.




This is the bulk of the wood in front of our house:




And here is some of the kindling:




It's been a lot of hard work, and now he has to clear the useless dregs of rotten wood.





And then, of course, chop up the wood and find somewhere to stack it.

Dave thrives on projects and works very hard and that's just part of who he is.



5 comments:

Anonymous said...

He’s a wonder!
Xx

Sue Hepworth said...

Yes he is! 72 and able to do all that.

marmee said...

How jealous i am !! There is a character in a book written by Jane Duncan that says: I am a person like this ...well I am a person like this : I love wood and logs and branches and every now and then we drive out to the edge of our national park and I collect branches that have fallen or been cut to make firebreak and I bring them home. And one happy day we drove past a huge tree that had been cut down ( a eucalyptus that had become a danger) and we loaded and loaded logs! But not ever an entire tree!

Anonymous said...

Have we lost the header photo or is that just on my ipad ?

Sue Hepworth said...

I still have a header photo so I think it’s just you who’s lost it. 🙁