A Deep River Year
 November 12, 2014

The year is coming round full circle. These past days have been mild and soft, but the forecast promises that much colder air is on the way. I have been out by the woodpile, splitting some big logs into smaller pieces that will make our hearth fires on the coming cold nights. I do this with some care, as my wife discourages me from using any tools that have the potential of causing injury. This is because I have a reputation for being a somewhat clumsy handyman.

However, I actually have some experience with an axe. As a teenager, there was a huge elm tree in our back yard that fell victim to the plague of Dutch Elm Disease. My father thought it would be a good thing for a young man to get some exercise by chopping it up, providing us firewood at the same time. I learned then that elm is almost impossible to chop; its grain is twisted and stringy and when it grabs the blade of the ax, it won’t let go. And it’s not a great firewood anyway; it burns with a peculiar smell. But we had plenty of it, and it took me the better part of a summer before I gave up and let my father have it hauled away. Now I enjoy chopping wood, especially the satisfaction of feeling the axe head hit home so that the log falls cleanly apart. These are the pieces—oak and maple-- that will burn red in our hearth in the winter days ahead.

We have a fire in us, too—the thing that burns in us with warmth and light in those cold, dark days. Hidden in us is a life that has grown through the green seasons--all those memories hidden inside, sometimes even unrecognized until something splits them open, reveals them to the light. They are both sweet and terrible, joys and sorrows, fueling in us some deep happiness or abiding anger. This week I unexpectedly remembered a football game in a neighbor’s yard many, many years ago, where I, at the bottom of a pile, fell on a fumbled ball and felt my wrist crack under the weight of all those people on top of me. I rode home alone on a bicycle, tried to wish the pain away, was taken to the emergency room, fearing death. I remember little else, except waking up in my bed, arm bound in a cast, with my father sitting on a chair beside me, hand on my shoulder. It is in me, this wood for my fire.

Wood, Split

A flurry of leaves
 and a west wind sings a winter song
 as the ax is raised,
 then arcs through the shining air
 and thunks into the wood’s heart.
 The log cries out, falls apart,
 split open, white, in the November sun.
 Here is the secret center,
 hidden for years while giving life
 to a once-tall oak,
 now revealed, seen, kept.
 So we grow, too,
 our memories stored
 in the dark center of us,
 every wound and wonder,
 each sweet joy and buried sorrow,
 the hallowed mornings and the night dreams,
 the unspent wishes and the silent regrets,
 the first kiss and the tendered hand,
 the shared meal and the lonely walk in rain,
 all there, all there,
 deep at the wood’s heart,
 ready to be flame.

 --Timothy Haut, November 12, 2014