Wood work, a day on the farm

I felt a sense of dread when my dad came into the kitchen last week and asked for my help. I was at my parents' farm for five nights last week and truly enjoyed the company of my mom, dad and sister; the latter drove up from her Waterloo home to stay with me on the farm. She and I shared the room and double bed just like we did growing up in the small farm house. This time, as then, we stayed up way past midnight every night, talking and giggling and pretending to be asleep when mom came in to tell us we better get to sleep. Some things never change.

It's good to be home. I still call it that, though I haven't lived there regularly since I left for college at age 18. The house is small, crowded and showing signs of wear. The yard is full of buildings and cars and half-finished projects that my dad means to finish. He likes help on projects, something I was reluctant to give as a teenager. I didn't like getting dirty or being outside (!) and the tasks were often tedious, dirty, time-consuming or physically challenging. Over the years I drove tractors (well, that wasn't so bad), unloaded hay bales into the barn, stacked wood, picked up rocks, pulled weeds and all manner of other small projects that required extra hands and bodies.

I think of that farm work as what my friend Angela calls “Type C” fun: an activity that isn't really all that fun when you're doing it but you're glad you did it. I remember how I longed to get to college and get an indoor job so that I could be freed from farm work. Of course I still helped during college and while I lived in Waterloo and ironically, when I visited my brother in Kazakhstan a few years ago (he was in the Peace Corps) we spent all morning hoeing potatoes in his host family's garden. My mom loved the picture we sent her.

So when my dad asked if I'd help stack wood on this trip, I groaned inwardly (maybe aloud) and started to cop a 16-year-old's attitude. But I don't see my family that often and he wasn't really asking for anything that difficult, so out I went, wearing old farm clothes that belonged to my mother.

Stacking wood might not sound like much, but it's an endeavor on my family's farm. They burn wood. To heat the house. That's the only heat there is. Wood comes from all over: from neighbors, from the woods near the farm (which belongs to my uncle) and from trees around the farmstead. This wood wasn't cut yet, so my sister's job was to drag the branches and piles that were stacked around the yard and bring them to my father, who was cutting them. He used a buzz saw, a blade mounted on a tractor. The blade was powered by another tractor; the two were held together by a quickly-spinning belt. We knew as children not to get too close to the belt, lest we lose a limb.

So dad sawed the trunks and branches into rounds to fit the wood stove. He threw them into a low-sided wagon, trying not to hit me, where I stacked them. I had to stop once to get some earplugs from the house to muffle the roar of the buzz saw. And after an hour and a half or so, we were all done. It occurred to me that the high temperatures this March meant they were done burning wood for the season. I was right; dad planned to cover the wagon and use it next season. After the roar of the buzz saw died down, we had a little time to chat about other things before he went on to his next project and I went back to the house.

As a child, I was a go-to-gal for stacking wood in the wood shed. Dad always said it was because I was the neatest and best wood-stacker in the family, fitting the wood logs snugly like so many puzzle pieces. I now realize there are all kinds of ways for parents to motivate their children to work, but it wasn't so bad. It wasn't so bad this time either, a way to feel closer to the father that I so often experienced as distant. It wasn't so bad to get a little dirty. There wasn't so much to dread, it seems.