Wyn Drabble has come up with a novel idea to pass the time while stacking firewood. Photo / File
Wyn Drabble has come up with a novel idea to pass the time while stacking firewood. Photo / File
One of my least-favourite chores is stacking firewood.
Here, I'm not just talking about putting a load neatly in a handy location. No, I'm talking about traipsing with it to a sheltered location somewhere else, at least two pieces on the gloved left hand and one piece in the glovedright hand.
And not just one load. Three, possibly four.
I have written of this chore before – it was many years ago – but today came a new development, one I hoped might ease the drudgery of carrying wood and the host heap appearing always to stay the same size, something to make me feel less like Sisyphus or Bartholomew Cubbins and his 500 hats.
Please do not torture yourself by reading on if you think this is totally silly but I classified the pieces into categories as I carried them. Just to liven things up. It gets even worse later because I gave names to the pieces of wood. Your call whether you carry on reading or not.
At first, the classification was quite simple – big, extremely medium or small – but I soon became far more imaginative.
Wyn Drabble
The smallest bits were "starty scraps", in other words, kindling. But, as the size increased, the classification became more – dare I say – sophisticated. And I would tell each piece how it had been classified. I could see no reason for keeping it a secret.
"You're a wedgy bit," I would say to one because it was narrower at one end but had put on a bit of weight at the hips.
"You're a big butch hunk," I would say to another, laying it separately as part of the solid base of a row yet to be started.
"You're an interesting one. I think I'll have to call you gnarly." That was all to do with rather unusual shape and not the newer meaning of the word. There were a few in this category so I had to come up with synonyms: contorted, twisted, grotesque.
A later interesting piece I named Frank Gehry, architect of Bilbao's stunning Guggenheim Museum and many other wondrous works around the world. I know it was a lofty title for a rough-hewn piece of wood but it had the unexpected but pleasing twists and turns I associate with Gehry.
It interests me that Gehry's source of design ideas was often a screwed up piece of paper. I felt he would be inspired by the piece of firewood I had named after him.
Architecture remained a recurring theme but never to the same lofty heights: fifties' state house, pergola, drill hall, hospital.
A shapely piece with a large knothole curving through it I called Henry Moore.
Had a visitor walked around the corner of the house as I was working, I could well have been put down as severely impaired and even carted away. But none came so I was safe in my game.
Naming individual pieces was challenging but, again, it helped pass the time and that was the purpose of the exercise.
So, I'm sure you can imagine how all this took some of the drudgery out of the chore and, to date, no men in white coats have come to take me away. I hope you might even be inspired to employ the same tactic when the task of wood stacking falls on you.
I can also tell you that, when I looked around to see how the host pile was being whittled away, it still looked … well … exactly the same.
Wyn Drabble is a teacher of English, a writer, musician and public speaker.
