Andrew Manier
Introduction
It’s a little strange how chores of the past become the treasures of today. A curious thing I’ve noticed as I’ve grown older and the distance between me and my childhood memories grows ever greater, the bad just sort of fades away. Of course, I know this to be ridiculous. I was a kid and what kind of kid doesn’t hate chores? And so, despite what my brain may say today, I’m completely sure of five things: I hated washing dishes, I hated sweeping and mopping, I hated doing laundry, I hated weed eating, and, most of all, I hated splitting wood. Who can say why my brain began to fabricate such fictions of fondness? I remember all those bad things but now they don’t seem so bad. I suppose, upon further reflection, if I were to just dig a little deeper into these memories, the illusions would begin to fade. That seemingly smooth flowing spring of my childhood would reveal itself to have bits of litter. I grew up and the struggles became greater and more frequent, and I suppose I can never really truly say what those experiences were like. All that’s left behind is the truth, my truth. The stories recounted within are about me when I was a kid. They sound great and are well… great. They’re cherished memories and lessons that have stuck with me, but they are just that; cherry picked stories that tie up with a neat little bow on top. What’s here probably isn’t what happened, and I’m sure it’s not what I thought of it as. It’s what I remember it to be. It’s what I hold dear in times of joy and what I cling to in times of despair. This is the work of my brain and time, which seamlessly draw together the frayed ends and torn cloth that makes up this quilt of memories I call me, and you call Andrew.
I
I mentioned that bit about chores in the preface with good reason. No one likes them and anyone who says they do is lying, probably. In my life I certainly did and still do my fair share of hating them. I won’t go into it because as I get older the twinge of embarrassment that once came along with a dirty room gradually becomes a more sharpened piece of shame. Regardless, when I was young, a chore that always got everyone out and working together for multiple hours on end was splitting wood. Our house had a massive fireplace and we kept it running continuously during the cold months of the year, stopping only to clear the ashes out or when we ran out of wood in the pile. Now, before you get any grandiose ideas about some large wall of wood that you see in those outdoorsy reality tv shows, that wasn’t us. That was actually our neighbor. Although, if you ask me, Old Tom and Judy cut that firewood one year and then never burned a lick of it afterwards. Year in year out of making a cozy little nest for snakes, insects, and all sorts of denizens that like dry and dusty places. That or they didn’t hate chores. In any case, this bit of my life takes place on a cold autumn afternoon, in the time after the pretty parts of fall. Leaves have fallen down and the yellows and reds which characterize the sublime beauty of autumn have given way to what could be described as the most depressing of environments. Brown leaves on the ground, gray branches hanging on the trees, and a dim sky which soaked the last morsels of color out of everything around. A point in time when good snow was still at least a month away, and the stuff that did fall to the ground graciously turned it into wet mud which released a lovely stench. The only upside to this half of the season is that it is usually cold enough that you don’t sweat while you work, and as such you don’t have a need to wear anything more than a light jacket.
I was outside with my family, Dad and “the boys.” That is, me, my dad, and my brothers Tucker and Eli. My oldest sister, Samantha, would have been out there helping but she was up North (the greater Chicago Area), living with my Aunt & Uncle while going to college. That day we were down at the end of the gravel driveway, which breaks off into a short little cul-de-sac to nowhere. The main path leads to the house and two cars would nestle in there. Normally that vestigial cul-de-sac would serve as additional parking space for whatever vehicles we had at the time, but at this point in the season, like it was many a year, it instead had become the receptacle for where we collected our rather large pile of uncut logs. Now, it didn’t quite have the countryside get-away visual appeal of a fully stacked pile of wood, but I firmly maintain that between the trees that loosely hugged its surroundings, the rusty boat trailer flanking the pile of wood, and the old tire laying face up next to some unused cinder blocks, there was a certain je nais se quois to our pile that gave it a rather respectable character.
It may seem strange to self identify yourself as a rodent, but in our situation it was the most accurate term to be applied. In our neighborhood we were much like the humble beaver. When someone’s tree had fallen down we’d go cut it up for them. Breaking it down piece by piece and loading it into our trailer to be brought home and put into our wood pile. “It’s free heat!” as my Dad would say, neglecting to consider the many hours of labor put in to acquire said “free heat.” Regardless, this particular load of wood was fresh and green which, to put eloquently, really sucked. Especially when I was my lazier age of fourteen. Before I get judged too harshly for that, at least let me explain to defend myself a bit. If you’re not in the know, fresh wood comes with two major downsides, one it burns like shit, as water content is high in the log, and two it’s a pain in the ass to split. Green wood has fresh fibers. Fresh fibers hold together tightly. Dry wood on the other hand is, well, dry. The lack of water ingratiates them with the disposition of friends of circumstance and they come apart without much convincing. This load had a strong nature with fresh pulpy resistance, and as such we employed our tried and true method of using a maul and a sledge. We’d swing the maul into the wood and then hit the backside with the sledgehammer driving the wedge deeper into the log and forcing it apart. Those familiar with splitting wood may wonder why we didn’t just use the maul, after all it’s designed for splitting wood. However, as the hours wear on and particularly difficult logs of wood are split, your old gas tank starts feeling empty pretty quick. Thus, in the name of efficiency, we’d use the two tools in tandem.
On this particular day, we were using the sledge a lot. In addition to its greeness, this particular oak tree had many branches which created tough to cut knots in the wood (those circular bits on a board). Despite our best methods, the going was slow, and our pace gradually wore itself to a crawl. After a bit, we took a brief break, and my older brothers and Dad swapped out who was doing what. My Dad took the sledge back from Eli, and Tucker decided he was still good to keep swinging the maul. Continuing from a little bit of whining about the work that piped up from me and my siblings, we got started again, just as we had for the past two hours. Roll a log over, set it upright, stand back a bit, maul goes in wood, hammer hits maul, wood is split. Simple as. Then, at this moment, the mundane was broken and we had our near meeting with a family tragedy.
I don’t know if you’ve experienced this, maybe you have, maybe not. There is a certain atmosphere that is born after you do something that could’ve killed you. It’s so palpable, it seems as if you can taste the tension. Everyone in the vicinity gets eyes that grow wide as dinner plates and all the grandeur of human consciousness falls away. In that one moment, it is crystalized in the mind just how soft flesh is and brittle bones are. The sledge hammer crashed down onto the maul like it had a hundred times that day; like it had done thousands of times in the years prior. A repetition of a mundane action just like the ones before it, but on that next swing, when the steel slammed into steel, a shard splintered off the back of the maul. Due to that invisible defect, that shard wheeled through the air whirring like a UFO a mere foot away from the heads of Tucker and my Dad, flying off over the lake to some unknown resting place. Despite us being outside, it felt as though everything in the world stopped. As if the natural order itself was upset. Each one of us stood there, mouth agape, eyes wide open, in a stunned silence, staring at each other in disbelief as to what just happened.
And before long someone, I’m not sure who, gingerly began to move again and the rest of us soon followed suit. That one second had burst from the flow of time and demanded it be remembered. When the shock of the moment passed, we all decided to call it a day. We stacked what we had cut and began our march back up to the house, relieved to have the same amount of holes in our bodies as when we started.
It’s terrifying when the universe decides to shoot at you. When something normal, something you don’t consider to be dangerous, comes within mere inches of changing your life in an irreparable way. You realize that the tools you use, the cars you drive, the food you eat, and the people you rely on are all a carefully stacked but ever fragile tower of cards. A tower of cards, that you’re powerless to reinforce. The tide of mortal terror and fear recedes as the mental moon of day to day life pulls it back. Either because of some instinctual need to not constantly live in fear or some logical reasoning which tells you it’s irrational, in the end you can’t spend all your life worrying about every little thing that goes on. If you do, well, my therapist tells me that’s an anxiety disorder. I sit today and wonder if this little instance was my first time where I truly struggled with my own mortality. Sure, I would run into death in other instances but old age seems so far away and health was something that I always had with me. Watching my paternal Uncle pass, the various pets that moved through my life over the years, or the animals lives I myself had taken while hunting, never brought to mind that me, Andrew Manier, would one day face a similar fate. That missile tearing through the air may not have hit anyone, but it knotted itself forcefully into the weave of me.