No, I didn’t carry water. And actually, it was more like chainsaw instead of chop.

Today, I spent the first part of the day outdoors climbing–sure, the morning started off cold, but with with a bright sun and a south-facing crag, it couldn’t have been a nicer November day.

We had planned a family dinner-and-a-movie outing for this evening, but that left me a few hours to tend to a couple of chores and repairs around the house. And one of those chores involved a power tool.

Our house sits on a couple of wooded acres, and there are a few trees that need to come down. The wind has been helping along the process, that’s for sure. And so has my oldest boy. He found a small white birch a couple of weeks ago that had snapped off about fifteen feet from the ground. I guess he wanted to see what it felt like to fell a tree with an axe, so that’s what he did. The he dragged said tree to the side of the house, where we had stacked our wood last month.

And that felled tree has been sitting there for these past two weeks, waiting to be reduced to firewood.

So today, I thought it was time to clear up the timber and stack the logs.

It didn’t take too long, and as with many of these sorts of chores, it wasn’t really a big deal. But it felt like I was doing the sort of work that humans have been doing for a long, long time (albeit not necessarily with power tools). I wasn’t just tidying up. I was helping prepare for winter.

Some time before the spring thaw, these same logs will be burning in our fireplace. And I will remember that little time it took to help keep our home just a little more cozy and warm.