Stacking Wood
The single most important thing my parents ever instilled in me: If I wanted anything in life, I had to work for it. I had to earn it.
As soon as I was old enough to work, I was making my own money. If I wanted something, I had to buy it myself. If it was expensive, I had to work harder, to make more money. I bought my own car and paid for the insurance, my own phones and pre-paid plans. Not that my parents never did anything for me, but once I was able to work, it was on me to support my leisure.
If I wanted anything else……like to be out past my curfew, or go to friends house, or do something that required permission….
I had to stack the wood.
I’m not kidding. I would use a 30 year-old-rusted wheelbarrow to cart logs of wood from one end the yard to the other. The tire on it was half flat. The wooden handles would splinter in my fingers. It creaked and moaned with every step. It sounded like Chewbaca.
Every two weeks, a giant truck would pull up the driveway and dump a 5-foot-high pile of logs in the backyard. First, I had to organize the logs into a “nice stack”. That took about two days. After the stack was perfectly in tact, I’d have to wheelbarrow the wood across the yard, to the other side of the house. Finally, I’d create a row of smaller piles. At the time, my angsty 13-year-old-self pouted and cried. This is child abuse! I would yell. This is not fair! I would scream. This is stupid!
After a while….I started to like stacking the wood. I realized the main reason I had hated it was simply because I was being told I had to do it. I hate being told what to do. I was a defiant child. Still am. Let me be free! Anyway…I decided to do it on my time. I began stacking the wood before even asking to do anything. It was my choice. My activity. My mission became stacking as fast as possible and challenging myself to stack perfectly. The logs became a giant game of Tetris. Real life Jenga. I grew to love the mud and bugs and dirt. I started twirling the sticks that wouldn’t fit in the stack. It wasn’t work, it was fun. And, oddly educational. There is an art to stacking wood properly, in criss-cross patterns for stability and dryer wood. It’s the science of air flow and balance. There’s a right way and a wrong way to stack it so it dries and doesn’t topple over.
On top of it all, I had outsmarted my dad. Beat his character-building system. If the wood was stacked I could do anything I wanted….right? After weeks of proactively stacking, an hour before a concert, it was my time to shine. The conversation went something like this:
“Dad, I’m going to a concert tonight!”
”Oh good, you stacked the wood?”
“Yes! I did it already.”
* long pause as he calculated my fate *
“Before you go…… you have to bring it inside and start the fire.”