firewood.

I love my morning runs. They're my favorite part of the week, and I actually look forward to them--something I never thought I would say about running. Now that I've gotten into a groove, it feels natural; it's a great stress-reliever, and I get a lot of writing done. My mind is always writing.

Just before my first mile is complete, I pass a small wood recycling business. I haven't quite gathered what the place actually does because I get lost in the piles of firewood stacked near the chain-link fence, and those piles pull me in further with their lingering scents of cedar and oak. Oak--I take it in and feel the cool morning--high 60s--brush against me. It feels like fall in Pennsylvania.

I'm reminded of Saturday mornings with my Dad. We would rush down the hill in his old Ford truck that hadn't been registered for road driving since the hit-and-run accident years ago. I should also mention that the brakes were pretty sketch. It was a bumpy ride down, and the interior always smelt of the crayons that I had left on the dash when I was very little; the colors melted into a rainbow-ed pool and hardened to match the polypropylene.

When we got to the bottom of the hill, across the road to Grandpap's corn cribs, we'd get out and start loading wood from the corn crib to the truck bed.
"Where are your gloves?" Dad would say, looking at my hands. My eyes would echo his, look at my hands, then back at him, as I shrugged.
"I don't have gloves."
He'd go back to the truck and start digging around the floor, the glovebox, behind the seat until he found me a pair of old leather work gloves. Oftentimes, the tips of the forefinger and thumb would be worn away, letting the woodchips and spare pieces of bark in anyways, which made me laugh at their purpose, until I got splinters.

Somedays, the corn cribs were empty or low, and we went into the woods. Dad would chainsaw while I followed behind and collected the cut quarters of logs, branches, bark. We saved every piece because even the small ones would help get the fire started. I liked to trail back and forth, two logs at a time from where Dad was cutting back to the truck, on whatever clearing or path we stopped that day.
"Why don't you use the wheel barrel?" (That's the technical term.) I would shrug and maybe once the path started getting long as Dad got further and further into the woods, trailing along the fallen tree, I would start piling them into the barrel to make the long trips easier. I never really liked using the wheel barrel because it meant that I would spend a lot of time standing around waiting for the wood to be cut. It was always cooler in the woods, and my nose, pink, would run with nothing but my sleeve to catch the cold & moist.

When the truck bed was full, we would take the firewood back to the house and load it into the cement shanty that Dad built on the side of the basement. I would usually be in the truck bed handing the logs in as Dad stacked them into steady lines, sturdy and straight to fit in as much as possible. Sometimes he would stand on a ladder and stack them to the ceiling as I stretched to reach from the lowered tailgate or piled some wood onto the tailgate so that I could stand in the shanty and just hand them up.

"It's sure nice to have some help. It goes a lot quicker with two people." He said it every time. Verbatim, with a little chuckle at the end. I would smile. This was the only chore that I enjoyed--being with my dad, outside, feeling the pull of my muscles in the physical act of work, feeling the pull of the seasons in the chilling fall, feeling the rewards of the warmth from the wood burner on cold nights in preparation for winter.

Or maybe, it was the one chore that I didn't mind because when I took the old gloves off at the end of the morning, small pieces of wood still stuck to my smooth skin, my hands still smelt of tight leather and oak.

Just before beginning my seventh mile, I pass the small lumber yard on my way back. The smell of the oak, the sweat on my skin chilling in the breeze, the light sun overhead still warming the day, the feeling of fall and of home--I wonder if, were I still in Pennsylvania, I would be saving my Saturday morning tomorrow to go get firewood with Dad.