Working Hard or Hardly Working

Being a child of the fifties and not necessarily a high culture person, what comes to my mind when I look at this pile of wood is the music from Rawhide “Rolling, rolling, rolling; keep those doggies rolling, rawhide.” The pile you are seeing is part of what came out of a dead oak tree which we cut down and which you saw laying on its side before all the trunk had been cut up last week. Needless to say, when it came down it caused quite a shaking in the ground around us. Each piece is too heavy for me to lift so it had to be rolled onto my trailer and rolled off again. This pile does not include the smaller limbs, etc. which have been added since this picture was taken.

Rolling those things around has taught me that, if I was ever so mistaken, all is not glamor with wood. It has its benefits, though. Although my son watched me cut it down in case we needed a call to 911, the rest of the work was done alone. Now, you’re going to say, “Aren’t you a little long in the tooth for that kind of work?” I do turn 75 this month, but for the last 35 or 40 years I’ve put in a hard day’s work every day. I read once that a 100-year-old said if you wanted to live to a ripe old age (all other things being equal) you should work hard to get hard. Because I wanted to and out of necessity, I’ve done that.

In the larger scheme of life (children dying in the Ukraine, people in various nations around the world starving, racism, etc.) I’ve made very little dent. I often feel frustrated about that, but I have to come back to my family and recognize that they are my first concern and do what I can for them. What you see in this picture is heat for next winter. I’ll move on to furniture making in the coming weeks and try to follow John Wesley’s advice: “Make all you can; save all you can, and give all you can.”

Bourgeois Furniture can be found at Berkeley Art Works in Martinsburg, WV (currently in the store window) and Bent River Trading Post in Capon Springs, WV.