The Woodpile

The woodpile stood against the north wall of the garden shed, and all through the bright cold morning Nyra and the girl carried the split logs to it. Each piece had been cut in the summer, when the light was long, and now it waited for the winter that was coming.

Nyra showed the girl how to lay the lowest course, bark side down, so the damp of the ground would not climb into the heart of the wood. A woodpile is a kind of promise made in the summer and kept in the winter, and the building of it is slow and plain and good.

They worked without hurry. The girl learned the weight of each log by carrying it, learned the grain by setting it, learned that no two pieces were ever the same and that the pile held together because of the difference between them. A wall of wood that was all one shape would topple. This one would stand because it was various.

By noon the pile reached the height of the shoulder of Nyra, and the sun had warmed the top row until the resin smelled sweet. The garden around them was bare and brown, the beds put to sleep, the roses cut back to blunt grey stems. But here against the wall was a stack of the summer, saved and set in order, ready to be given back to the air as heat.

Nyra placed the last log and stepped back, and the girl stepped back beside her, and together they looked at the thing they had made. It would not be remembered the way a book is remembered. It would be burned. And yet the warmth of it would carry them through the dark months, and that, Nyra knew, was its own kind of keeping.