Because it's Saturday, the cat felt that he had to hoick me out of bed way too early. So here I am, limp and bleary, staring out the window at the two cords of rain-soaked firewood I'll need to spend the rest of the day moving. Tom and I had a very comic conversation last night, in which we realized that our finely honed firewood-moving system was no longer going to work for us here. In Harmony one of us would run the splitter (mostly Tom but sometimes me and, later, both of the boys), and then the rest of us would take shifts stacking as quickly as we could. Everything was set up right outside the woodshed, so the stacker could work as fast or faster than the splitter. Now, however, we have to haul this firewood from the driveway, carry it around the back of the house, and then stack it against the shed. Moreover, we have no woodshed, so we have to stack it in the open air, without walls to automatically hold it--which means we have to make solid criss-crossed row ends, which Tom (with good reason) does not trust me to do skillfully. So who moves the wood, who stacks it, who runs the wheelbarrow, what will the pace be like? These may seem like unimportant questions, but two decades of GET THE WOOD IN NOW have trained us to treat the task like an assembly line. When my son phoned and I explained our dilemma, he laughed but also immediately understood it. There was never any messing around when it came to getting that wood under cover.

But at least the weather will be beautiful and springlike. In Harmony we seemed to always be doing this crazy marathon in November, trying to beat the snow, or maybe not quite beating it so getting our gloves soaked with snowmelt, and then having to take turns thawing out in the house because we were losing feeling in our hands.